riksucks

Hello, I started working on a side project during my free time, and I was thinking of converting it into a side hustle. The side project involves ensuring data-integrity and ownership of a file by storing metadata about it in blockchain (the actual file isn't stored). I was thinking of letting others use it, but what if it's not secure enough? What if people use it and something happens, would I be in hot water?

Once I develop the project enough, I do plan to make it open source, and only after that I would launch. At least that's the plan. I was wondering how to do good enough security audits on your own when the software is finally built. As I am merely a sophomore in college, I can't afford professionals for the same.

What do you guys suggest?

I was looking at websites like, https://www.blockcerts.org/, https://certif-id.com/ , https://www.dnv.com/assurance/certificates-in-the-blockchain.html and it seems like that there seems to be a use for issuing certificates in blockchain. Apart from the fact that your data won't be tampered with and will always stay on there (no one would just delete it), I cannot find any other pros/advantage of storing certificates in blockchain.

In the certif-id website, the company claimed that "ASDC chose Certif-ID as their go to platform to automate their certification process. With Certif-ID, they optimised their certification process using blockchain to protect their brand against certificate fraud and ease their operational flow." I don't really get how blockchain can help automate the process, as someone still has to issue the documents? The only automation I see is verification becoming easy, but to be quite honest that can be done with traditional solutions too. The only new thing that blockchain puts forward here is, that the certificates are tamper-proof. But even that can be implemented by hashing.

Is this quackery, or is there some advantage that I don't seem to understand. Some of you are entrepreneurs here and may have services where you guys issue certs, do you guys see yourself using their services, if yes why?

Also, I am not critical of blockchain, I am a student who is looking into writing a paper on blockchain related topic, and I was thinking of writing some literature in this topic, but I want to get an intuitive understanding of why this technology is better. Or how can it get better? or where this technology can lead to? To me, I believe, good scalable solution at the same level as blockchain can be provided using old technology.

(This is not a hate thread, I am genuinely curious, as I mentioned, I am thinking of working on a blockchain paper)

I am a second year student pursuing CS from India, mostly doing open source and freelance. Recently me and my friend planned to take a shot at a startup. And while developing a product we realised that we often say "this MIGHT BE the problem", or "this MIGHT BE the best way to solve the problem". But after researching and discussing for days, we realised how far off we were. We realised that with every new idea we sort of vouch for it and in hindsight don't see any problems that should be obvious. Since we are just tech people, we really think that it would be good to have some sort of mentor(s), to at least quickly validate/invalidate whatever we come up with and point us to the right direction.

My question is, how do I, a guy from second year of college, who has never attended a single offline class (due to COVID) can approach mentors? I do realise that many people here met many such people in real life who changed their paths or even passively guided them, what would you suggest to a homestuck kid from India???

Please feel free to provide other generic advice too, so that others can benefit from this thread. Thanks :)

To give you a background, I am a second year CS student. I was recently contacted by a company which just had it's series A funding. The HR recruited me (probably solely because of keywords in resume). Now, I wonder how startups hire, since they have to allocate money judiciously, especially the seed stage startups. What I believe is that not only do you have to choose people who are good at technical aspect, but also someone who gets along with the team. Also eager to know if startups consider other aspects too.

Do founders regret their decisions during their early hirings?

so 1) what is the paradigm that is being followed nowadays by seed and series A startups to hire the right candidate? 2) are the HRs inept? 3) what aspects these early startups are looking for, from a candidate?

these questions might be very straight forward, but bear with me since I am a student. eager to see constructive discussions!

HN is filled with people from different walks of life who have done various stuff, so thought of asking here :)

To give you a background, I am a second year CS student and I am thinking of starting a community (probably in discord) for catering to people who are interested in open source and hackathons (and development in general). I have seen too many people in engineering getting intimidated by development in first year and hence they only work on their leetcoding skills (and poor projects down the line). So the aim is to have a community that welcomes newcomers to the hackathon space and also open source space.

How would you have started? And if you have experience in building communities that are non-technical, you can still chime in, it would be amazing to listen to you.

Also can any kind of service be built around this community?