Keyless Company Signals

What it answers

| function | answers | |---|---| | `edgarFormD` | SEC Form D filings naming this company — the hardest public evidence that a private company raised, or is raising, money | | `jobFeeds` | open roles from a public careers board (Greenhouse → Lever → Ashby) — the cleanest free hiring signal there is | | `hnMentions` | Hacker News stories with points and dates | | `waybackAge` | the oldest archived snapshot of a domain — a cheap read on how long the site, and probably the company, has existed |

Fail-soft by design, and honest about the cost

Every helper bounds at 8 seconds, and any failure — timeout, 500, malformed JSON, unknown slug — yields an empty result instead of throwing. These run in parallel beside real work; one flaky public endpoint must never take down the sweep that called it.

The cost is STATED rather than hidden: an empty result means "nothing found OR could not check", and the module does not distinguish them. Do not read `[]` from a Form D lookup as "this company has never raised".

You must identify yourself

`userAgent` is a REQUIRED argument, not a default. The SEC requires automated clients to identify themselves with a real contact address and blocks those that do not. A default would put whoever packaged the library on your outbound traffic and misidentify you to a regulator, so an absent one throws immediately rather than failing quietly at the far end.

The details that are easy to get wrong

A board miss is normal. Most companies are on at most one of the three, so a 404 means "not this one" and the search continues. A board answering with ZERO postings also loses, because an empty board is indistinguishable from a slug collision and must not mask the real careers page behind it.

The Wayback CDX response has a header row. Row 0 is column names; the earliest capture is row 1. Reading row 0 formats the literal string "timestamp" into a plausible-looking date — wrong on every lookup, and never obviously so.

Ask HN posts have no external URL, so they fall back to the HN item link rather than being dropped — those are exactly the discussions ABOUT a company rather than merely linking to it.

Verified

17 tests, 10 deliberate defects, all 10 caught — including the SEC user-agent guard removed (every Form D lookup then silently returns empty and reads as "never raised"), the CDX header row read as data, the board search stopping at the first 404, and the 8-second bound quietly becoming ten minutes.

Delivery

Source delivered as a private repository invite within 24 hours of purchase. Single-product commercial license: use and modify in any number of products; no redistribution or resale of the source.

Interface

What you call, and what comes back. Types and signatures only — the implementation ships with the source.

  export function resolveTimeoutMs(opts: SignalOptions): number;
  export async function edgarFormD(company: string, opts: SignalOptions): Promise<FormDHit[]>;
  export async function jobFeeds(company: string, opts: SignalOptions): Promise<JobFeed | null>;
  export async function hnMentions(company: string, opts: SignalOptions): Promise<HnMention[]>;
  export async function waybackAge(domain: string, opts: SignalOptions): Promise<WaybackSnapshot | null>;

  export type HnMention = { title: string;
  export type WaybackSnapshot = { firstSnapshot: string;