Proof of Usefulness Hackathon Final Winners Announced 🎉

Hacker Noon2026-10-30 16:00:04AI应用,开源,快手,文生视频,Agent智能体,扩散模型,强化学习,招聘HR原文 ↗

Once you discover truly useful software, it’s hard to ignore. It finds its way into your life and workflow, helping you answer a nagging question, finish tasks more efficiently, make faster decisions, or solve a problem that existing tools made more complicated than it needed to be. Before long, you might even start to wonder how you ever got by without it.

When we launched the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon in January, we wanted to give the people building these kinds of solutions a platform, along with a share of $150,000 in cash prizes and software credits to help them keep building. Alongside Bright Data, Neo4j, Algolia, and Storyblok, we invited builders to show us what their projects could do and provide the evidence to back it up.

And boy, did they show up.

Over the course of the hackathon, we received hundreds of submissions and published just shy of 300 stories on the #proof-of-usefulness-hackathon page. Behind those numbers are builders who took the time to share their work, explain the problems they were tackling, and put their progress out there for others to examine.

To everyone who submitted a project, published a report, or spent time discovering what others had built: thank you for making this hackathon's inaugural edition a success.

In May, we announced our first set of winners, recognizing projects across all five award categories. Today, we’re closing out the hackathon with the final round of winners.

This round covers the remaining $118,000 in prizes, comprising $12,000 in cash and $106,000 in software credits, distributed across the following categories:

AWARD CATEGORY	FINAL-ROUND PRIZE POOL
Bright Data	$60,000 in software credits + $6,000 in cash
Algolia	$40,000 in software credits.
Neo4j	$6,000 in software credits.
Storyblok	$3,000 in cash.
HackerNoon	$3,000 in cash.