skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: 8vdX (YC W22) – Venture debt to complement a seed round
Hey HN! We are Ravi and Vijay from 8vdX! (https://www.8vdx.com/) We are building a founder-friendly venture debt marketplace for early stage startups. We also provide seed-extension debt to breakout companies to extend their runway to get to a better Series A raise. Our mission is to be the preferred debt partner for high growth startups and scale with them as they grow from seed stage to Series A and beyond.

Vijay and I were both working at Eight Capital, a high yield fund that I cofounded, when we gave a bridge loan to Kodo (a startup from YC W21) to support their high growth rate while they were getting their YC funding. Kodo is an Indian company and had to complete some standard processes for that to happen, but they needed money right away. Our loan allowed them to accelerate their growth and they ended up having an amazing Demo Day result.

We wondered, could this be repeated with other startups or was it a one and done investment? We looked at publicly available data and quickly came to the conclusion that we could indeed underwrite venture debt to seed to early stage startups. That was the genesis of the 8vdX venture debt marketplace.

We launched 3 months ago and have already provided venture debt to 16 startups. In good YC fashion, we’ve been focused on our batchmates to begin with :) But we believe this model can scale beyond the YC ecosystem and we’re very interested in that.

Why do we think this makes sense right now? Seed rounds today are the same size as Series A used to be a decade ago. But there are no existing players who provide venture debt to early stage startups. Last year, seed and early stage and Series A startups raised ~$100B from equity investors. Venture debt can be up to 25% of the balance sheet of these rapidly growing companies, making this a $25B annual opportunity in this underserved market.

Our loans are founder friendly. We do not force founders to open captive bank accounts, cash flow sweeps, take personal guarantees of the founders, or force the startup into bankruptcy if the startup is unable to repay. We have a simple and transparent application process to receive funds through the 8vdX digital platform.

Currently, startups can apply digitally for up to $150k of debt by visiting our startup portal at 8vdx.com, and upon approval, the funds are wired to their account on the same day. 8vdX has a capital-light business model as the venture debt to the startups are entirely funded by angels and institutional investors through the marketplace. We have a deep product pipeline which includes multi-currency venture debt that can be extended on day zero to international companies. We will be supporting local currency venture debt for startups in India, Australia, United Kingdom, Mexico and Indonesia for the YC S22 batch and our goal is to support even more countries in the future. We are also inviting platform partnerships from online investment apps to distribute the 8vdX venture debt offering to their clients.

Vijay and I look forward to hearing your ideas, questions and feedback. Thank you!
> It depends on whether you want your Hello World programs to reflect an actual program or just be an approximation. I’d argue there is little benefit in the latter.

There's a huge benefit in having a program that verifies you have set up the programming environment successfully and can build and execute your programs. Far more than the didactic benefit of any "Hello World" program.

Handling terminal output is just an extra nice-to-have at that point, and one convenient way to verify your tools are working. Correct error handling is definitely out of scope.
If printf can write some bytes but not all of them. The C documentation is explicit:

> a negative value if an output error occurred

So in your case that's an error and printf returns a negative value. But yes, how many bytes were written is a lost information.
How can we find out where these Data Brokers get our data from, so we can know which companies to avoid?
Had the same issue with my first startup. 50:50 split, no agreement in place for the eventuality of a founder disagreement or one founder leaving the company. We were able to negotiate an acceptable solution but emotionally it was quite draining and it tarnished a good relationship/friendship. Also, in the end the company was not worth much, so in retrospect much quibble and stress about nothing.

I think the problem is that in the eyes of a founder their company is always worth a lot, as they tend to see the potential instead of the status quo. That said trying to leave a company that isn't profitable while keeping a 50 % stake and offloading the job of getting to profitability to your co-founder is pretty toxic. Asking to retain a small stake depending on the duration of your tenure seems reasonable though. For a bootstrapped company I think a 4-6 year vesting schedule is reasonable, though it highly depends on the situation of the company. Some businesses are still nowhere near profitable or stable after 4 years, so they won't survive one founder leaving with 50 % of the shares as it will make future investment highly unlikely (most VCs would never touch a company with a 50 % shareholder that has already left) and will destroy the morale of the remaining founders (as they will often think that half of their work will go towards someone who no longer contributes in a meaningful way to the company).
First off, main should return 0 on success, not 1. Second, puts() will happily return 0 when writing to /dev/full.
Well at least it’s better than numpy’s csv functions. For my use case (~4 million images, one row per image, 2048 fp32 columns for features extracted with resnet), parsing/encoding csv with pandas was 10x faster than with numpy. Of course serializing the arrays to/from npy was 10x faster than any csv library.
When you set up a start-up, you should now give ownership out that generously; give out options that vest over time, and place provisions in the shareholder agreement that specify what happens if one co-founder leaves.

Investors could minimize risk by providing templates for the various jurisdictions that show how this is done, for using lawyers to codify is going to cost more than the startup is initially worth, hence the common but entirely unnecessary infighting.

I use Elementary on one box and like it (only qualm to date: no window minimize button), whereas Ubuntu is nearly everywhere else. It would be nice if the community (= people closer to the founders that they know and trust) could step in and mediate.

It is correct, once you own shares they are yours forever, and unless a contract (shareholder agreement) says otherwise, they are yours to keep. It is NOT appropriate to want to participate in decisions after a full departure. In fact, that may also cause conflicts with one's next employment. Founders that leave may retain a purely passive stake. If they are smart, they understand that that can only be a small stake, otherwise the venture is at risk, because no investor wants much "dead wood" in the share pie.

The broader question is how to monetize a Linux distribution, I find that harder to think about than monetizing open source in general, which is already a little more challenging than selling proprietary software (you can sell services, but while that is easier than selling products, it only scales linearly with headcount => bad idea).

Guys, don't fight over 30k, in tech at your levels that's two monthly salaries!
I am glad for your team, that you genuinely care. There are enough people stuck in management positions that should sit locked in the basement instead of managing people and making their lives miserable. Currently my one-on-ones are 20 minutes meetings once a year where manager reads from paper what he thinks about my performance last year. I have no right to question his decision. I could open a case with HR to review my review, but it will not improve anything for sure. As long my reviews are good I am good.
Yes! This Computerphile's video is a must watch!
Energy Return on Investment: A Unifying Principle for Biology, Economics, and Sustainability
Agreed. In a real world business requirements scenario, it would be dropped as premature optimisation if it was even considered at all.
SUSE is another one I'm aware of.
Some projects also fund themselves off support, I believe cURL does it.
I haven't read the book, so I'm curious to know what it was about the way they described maths that helped you so much?
Also, one should compare the properties with the Mersenne Twister. The new PRNG proposals, algporitjms have better properties than the Mersenne Twister. Which one is best is a moving target. The point is that there are better to the Mersenne Twister alternatives today.

It is a bit like people still choose to use MD5 or SHA-1. They are choosen because they are well known, easy to find info about and implementations to use.
> This isn't just about the filesystem being full btw. If you imagine a command like ./foo.py | head -n 10, it only makes sense for the 'head' command to close the pipe when it's done, and foo.py should be able to detect this and stop printing any more output.

The usual way of handling this is by not (explicitly) handling it. Writes to a closed pipe are special, they do not normally fail with a status that the program then all too often ignores, they result in a SIGPIPE signal that defaults to killing the process. Extra steps are needed to not kill the process. No other kind of write error gets this special treatment that I am aware of.
The thing is, people don't do that. At least not everybody is so open to naturally take the initiative. So scheduling in something makes sure it actually happens.
That belief is surprising, because I remember an at least 10 year old optimization advice from Intel to put ud2 after a ret or jmp to avoid speculation.

Also some amount of speculation even for untaken branches is unavoidable: the fetch stage need to know whether to fetch the next instruction or not before the unconditional jump is decoded, which is multiple pipeline stages downstream.
Always thought that Aesprite were onto something good. Assuming I've got this right, the source code is out there and free, but you need to pay for the compiled binaries. Most people can't be bothered doing the latter, so paying a bit for it is worthwhile
> You're implying that Grsecurity's incentive to be safer than upstream means they won't cooperate.

> But Grsecurity made their patches freely available for the vast majority of their existence.

I didn't say anything about whether they made their patches freely available or not. Not sure what that has to do with what I wrote.

> I think it just shows ignorance of the situation to imply that they're only interested in making money.

I didn't imply that. I said they have a vested interest in perception of being more secure than upstream. Which they do. Replying with vague snark and going off on some wild tangent imagining things that I never implied isn't helpful if you can't address what I wrote.

I didn't say anyone is to blame as such, nor does grsecurity have any requirement or moral duty to put effort into upstreaming their work. But if you look at the motivation there is a pretty reasonable explanation why they have not done so, in my opinion that's more reasonable and likely than the idea that it's upstream being particularly unfair or uncooperative to this one group.
tldr: always check the return value of system calls.

(also, printf is buffered, so close or flush your output)
> So does 'Hello World\n' need to check that printf() succeeded, or does it actually need to go further and check that printf() returned 12?

No. According to fprintf(1), when the call succeeds it returns the number of printed characters. If it fails (for example, if it could only print part of the string) then it returns a negative value.

The number of printed characters is useful to know how much space was used on the output file, not to check for success. Success is indicated by a non-negative return value.
Bingo! This is the best i have read all week.

You will love this HBR article : https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
In your pseudocode, "Print Hello World" doesn't come with any caveats, like "unless there is an error, in which case silently don't print Hello World". If an error might occur, your description is incomplete if you don't describe the policy that should be taken.

Your second point might be fine, except that it doesn't describe the API that languages actually use to print. For sure, it's trivial to implement the policy you describe, but suggesting that everyone always needs that policy is rather limiting and makes light of the real bugs that failure to handle errors actually results in.
Apart from this disagreement, donationware is super tough, the conversion rates aren't great in general -- and this will reinforce the assumption that linux users don't want to pay. It's a shame all round.
And this is the reason unit tests are very often insufficient and provide vanishingly small value. They test programming details, while integration tests test requirements implemented via programming. Loved your first paragraph.
What would have happened if every Ukrainian wired all his money to Putin and signed contracts that they're his slaves now?

After all, Putin can move with impunity, because if we do anything, he nukes everyone, and the anwser to the margin-nuke question „Should we really start a nuclear armageddon for X?“ is always no, even if it‘s progressing from „Ukraine“ to „Romania“, „Italy“, „remaining EU countries“, „NYC“, „Washington State“, „Southern half of US states“, etc.

From a game-theoretical POV, any nuclear power is allowed to do anything as long as the marginal anything they are currently doing is small enough.
Interesting take but I see two problems with that:

1. if you're testing your development environment then handling errors appropriately is even more important. The last thing you want to find out is that your development environment doesn't work because of some edge case that wasn't tested.

2. if your code is just to test the development environment then ship that test code with the development environment rather than publish it on your home page as a practical example of your languages code.

What you're describing is effectively a behavioral test, not a Hello World example.
1. We follow a "trusted devices" model, where you 2FA using your phone number for the first login on a device. Future logins on that device aren't 2FA'd. I agree that using a code gen is a good improvement we can make over time.
2. Marketing opt-out is prominent in account settings. Any email that is very strictly not transactional is considered marketing by our team, and can be opted out of. Developing simple, focused products is core to our identity and we won't add irrelevant features that might upsell to 10% of customers. I assure you there won't be a "refer your friends" badge blinking on the home page of the app.
3. Unfortunately we're not on web yet - but we'd love to get there after iOS and Android. We hear from most people that iOS or Android are their preferred platforms, so we have to start there.
4. We share data as required to support financial transactions and other core parts of the business, but we do adhere to the GDPR.
5. I think VPNs are allowed - at least I don't think we block them in particular.

We're excited to bring a fresh perspective and better pricing to a landscape with a lot of providers doing approximately the same thing. We'd love for you to try out the app once it's available - if you decide to register on our site we'll be sure to keep you updated.
I had problems until i realized i still had `pulseaudio-*` packages installed. Now I only have `pipewire` and `pipepire-pulse` and everything works flawlessly.
Different countries have different import duties, which are "hidden" costs for foreign products. It's possible that these types of tariffs cause Apple stuff to be more expensive in Brazil.
Is there transparency of these dates to the Netflix clients? If not, it is from that perspective pretty arbitrary.
I feel like I'm living the life of a caveman, reading this.

But to be honest, only very few use cases would be applicable in my standards.

For example, never would I want remote controllable locks.
i was scarred by i = i + 1. How can 2 equal 3?
China to provide 5 mln yuan worth of humanitarian assistance to Ukraine
Should "hello world" return error if it actually prints something but there was no person to read the output? Maybe the user was distracted and was not looking at the screen. Does a "hello world" program make sound if no one hears it?

Sounds like the program failed its objective, greeting the world. And thus imho shouldn't return 0.
Why do you think of Altera as non-personal chips?
Those issues were all almost 20 years ago.

If you think this is still a problem, you haven't used any recent Macs. The current MB Air and MB Pro both run very cool even under prolonged heavy loads.

Apple's management of any and all heat issues has been far better than any competitors for a while now.
I totally can see myself regretting one day on dropping out of University. Not that I ever needed the degree really, but just for the feeling of closing what you've started.

Same with sport, I was pretty good at some point, preparing for a state competition in swimming, but fell in love and dropped out of trainings (and she dumped me some 6 months later). If I worked harder back then perhaps I'd now have a medal on my wall to boost my ego with. There're literally millions of such events in everyones' lives, some small, some big, some more important and some less, and it's just a question if you'll go back to them one day or leave them be...
True but I can only imagine the cost of that headset. It will be sure the 1% of the 1% :'(
The interesting case for me is if the requirements were "print Hello World". I'd argue that the one with an explicit return value is incorrect in that case, because the extra line of code leads you to believe an extra requirement exists which is to indicate success.
I'm not cranky but I do, with good reason, always assume that finance companies are trying to hide fees until it's very definitely proven otherwise. So here's a quick UI suggestion:

> × 1.199473 live rate

Turn the "live rate" into a link that shows where you get the live rate from.
> Sadly my eyes aren't as good as they used to be so I can't make a lot of use of the extra real-estate, but it always seems as if they're ahead when it comes to resolutions on consumer devices.

With proper 2x scaling as intended by Apple there is no extra screen real-estate. 5k at 2x scaling gives you the real-estate of a 2560 x 1440 display, just with a doubled pixel density and thus much sharper. This is the actual value of HiDPI display.
C++ Streams
That would mean you can just buy 'hotelsincornwall.com' and no one will be allowed to bid for 'hotels in corwnwall'. You are now facing a different problem.
https://wise.com/
Stories don't have to be remarkable; this is a parent recording a moment in their and their child's life, something that they might otherwise forget or get lost in the mud of other memories jumbled together. I think it's quite cute.
Hacker News should just remove the link to the blog and replace it with the actual twitter thread. There's no additional information provided by Lunduke, and based on earlier work by Lunduke, it unfortunately looks intentional.
Decoherence theory is really somewhat orthogonal to the measurement problem. Decoherence explains how the "collapse" happens gradually if you have a non-perfectly isolated system by seeping entanglement. But at some point you still need to activate the stipulation that you as an observer is drawn into the entanglement and at that point whatever's left of the wavefunction "collapses".

In essence the Copenhagen interpretation is still correct as a simplification that can still be OK in most cases. This is reflected by the fact that practising solid state physicists have successfully used this 20's style of QM for 100 years now.
In C, yes. But for C++ you can use exceptions if you want. You just have to "protect" all the "primitives" and after that you're safe.
I've seen the pay-for-binaries model in a few places.
Not sure if it's scalable since someone can write a build script and share it with the community.
Right I totally forgot about SUSE.

But I'm not really counting cURL because that's just one person right? The challenges faced by essentially a 1-person freelancer are quite different than a larger company. Or is cURL now a whole company at this point? EDIT: I see you mean this as a separate category of just "projects."
Not a smart move for the parting founder though as keeping a 50 % stake of an unprofitable company will drastically reduce the chance of that company succeeding. The remaining founder won't be able to secure funding (no sane VC will touch a company with such a cap table) or offer those shares to new hires. Shares are a means to generate value, they should be handed out in exchange for taking risks (as the original founders), doing work (early hires / employees) or contributing money (investors). Having a large fraction of shares just "lie around" without contributing anything is pretty damning for a startup. Most likely outcome of those situations is that the remaining founder will abandon or sell the company.
It feels like they're catching up; there was a long lull where they seemed to focus entirely on iphone, with the occasional macbook because they needed devices to make apps for iphone on.

I mean their bread and butter will still be the iphone and co, but I'm glad they seem to have moved away from min/maxing for whatever brings in the most money.
What do you mean flow info? Generally selling flow means letting market makers fill orders for a fee. How much is just the info worth, especially in FX?
Sebastiano Vigna seems to have a beef. For all I've seen M.E. O'Neill has handled the situation really well. Taking Vignas claims and critique seriously.

https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/on-vignas-pcg-critique.html
Right. Set a time limit but not an agenda. Let them be free to tell you anything even if you think it is unnecessary. They key is to build psychological rapport so that gradually he/she feels more comfortable to open up and start Trusting you.
A code gadget is any pre-existing string of binary code in an executable that by chance happens to have some specific properties that make it possible to be repurposed by an attacker, usually by jumping in the middle of it.

IIRC the term was introduced with the Return Oriented Programming style of attacks and reused for spectre-like speculation attacks.
Boundaries are established, they are not "found". Algeria, Angola and Namibia. Check the borders of those 3 countries, there is nothing natural about those borders.

Countries try to enforce their borders. And they normally regulate traffic through a custom, the rest is deemed unlawful.

More on the point: the current internet is a mess. Hopefully it collapses and a new network is built, with security in mind this time.
> Edit: also, pipewire gained support for nicer bluetooth codecs faster than pulseaudio did.

Yep, I have a pair of Sony WH-1000XM3 which supports better codecs like LDAC and you had to resort to a 3rd party, home-made repository in Ubuntu for pulseaudio (initially there were licensing reasons but then Sony opensourced it IIRC). With PipeWire (on Ubuntu 21.10) I just have to install a package from the standard repo.
The formation of the statement is the problem. Try:

> everything can be viewed through the lens of politics

You wouldn't say "everything is geographical" because that would be absurd (just as absurd as "everything is political") but you could view most topics through the lens of geography if that was the hammer turning all your concerns into nails.
Happy to have helped you find your long lost favorite! :)
HP Devices – Vulnerabilities in Firmware