Education & Reference
Beating the Averages
Last updated 2026-07-11 · benchmark checked 2026-08-12 · unchanged since 2026-08-08 — deterministic & reproducible
Paul Graham's essay arguing that Lisp gave his startup Viaweb a competitive edge.
Is Beating the Averages production-ready?
Legit.Show scores Beating the Averages 49 out of 100 — the simple average of its 7 measured frames. Legit.Show ran its deterministic 7-Frame production-readiness benchmark on Beating the Averages (public-surface assessment), measured from the public surface with no LLM in the scoring path. Its strongest frame is Performance; its weakest is Security. Every frame it averages is published with its evidence on the Legit.Show listing.
The 7 Frames
- Performance — 95/100
- Accessibility — 76/100
- Security — 10/100
- Privacy — 25/100
- Reliability — 67/100
- Standards — 53/100
- Discoverability — 15/100
What we measured
- No Content-Security-Policy and no HSTS.
- Served over HTTPS with a valid certificate.
- Real Lighthouse performance run — 420 ms to first byte.
- 0 of 0 sampled routes reachable.
- No privacy policy found.
- Sets cookies / loads scripts with no consent prompt.
Who built it
Paul Graham · product account @paulg
Who it's for
Startup founders · Software developers · Programmers · Technology decision-makers
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