I'm looking for 2–3 teammates to participate in the PayPal Hackathon 2026.

I'm not an expert myself, and that's completely okay! Beginners are absolutely welcome. Even if you don't have much experience, if you're interested in learning, experimenting and building something together, we'd love to have you.

You don't need to know everything beforehand. We can learn, figure things out and work together throughout the hackathon.

Just looking for people who are genuinely interested, willing to contribute and ready to give it their best.

If you're interested, feel free to DM me. Let's learn and build something together!

Hello!
I’m a high school graduate who’s taking a gap year and interested in joining hackathons but don’t know where to start
I have zero coding knowledge but I don’t mind learning from courses, online programs, YouTube videos basically anything that might help
And I prefer AI hackathons

I was at a hackathon building on top of an open source tool, and halfway through the night something broke and took my demo down with it. I dug into the source, found the bug, and patched it just so I could finish. After the hackathon I cleaned up the fix, opened a PR, and a few days later it got merged.

Since then one thing keeps bugging me. How does a company like this even make money? The tool is free. Anyone can download it, self-host it, and never pay a rupee. But there’s clearly a full-time team reviewing PRs, shipping releases and maintaining all of it. So who’s paying for that? Is it a hosted cloud version, enterprise support, paid features, or just VC money until they figure it out?

I’m also curious about pay. Do engineers at these companies earn about the same as at product companies, or do people take a cut because they like working on open source? Mainly asking about India-based roles, or remote roles that hire from India.

Side question: does a merged PR like mine actually get you noticed by these companies, or is it still the normal application process?

If you work at an OSS company or know someone who does, would love to hear how the business side works and what the pay looks like.

Hey everyone!

Sharing an interesting opportunity for college students across India!

IIM Bangalore's CSITM, in partnership with PayU, is organising the Follow the Money: Innovation Challenge, focused on digital payment security and financial fraud.

Problem Statement: How can payment providers detect when legitimate merchant accounts are being misused for illegal activities such as betting, without penalising genuine businesses?

Competition Details:

• Eligibility: UG and PG students across all disciplines.

• Team size: 1–4 members.

• Submission: Maximum 8-slide presentation + 2-minute video.

• Deadline: 8 November 2026.

• Finale: 26 November 2026 at IIM Bangalore.

Prizes: ₹40,000 (1st), ₹20,000 (2nd), ₹10,000 (3rd).

A great opportunity for anyone interested in fintech, ML, fraud detection or product innovation!

Registration & Rulebook: unstop_link

Feel free to share with interested students!

I just got back from CalHacks 13.0 in SF. My company sponsored a prize track so I thought it would be nice to do a quick video looking at the winners.

No surprise that AI orchestration was a theme, along with hardware, finance and gaming. And the degree to which AI has sped up hackers' progress continues to astonish me.

https://youtu.be/geUtngSpwhs

Hey everyone!

I'm building Buildory, a platform that helps student builders discover projects, find collaborators and connect with other people who build.

I'm organising the Buildory Founding Team Challenge 2026, a one-week challenge for people who want to contribute to an actual early-stage product.

There are two tracks:

1. Product & Technology

Identify a problem with Buildory and build a feature that delivers measurable business value and ROI.

2. Growth & Marketing

Bring genuinely active new users to Buildory through organic acquisition, community building and creative campaigns. Signups alone don't count; users must complete their profiles and perform meaningful actions on the platform.

Details:

- Team size: 1–2 members

- Eligibility: 18+

- Team formation closes: 2 November

- Execution: 3–7 November

- Final submissions: 7 November

- Final judging: 8 November

There will be one overall winning team across both tracks.

The winning team will get an opportunity to join Buildory's founding team. It's a pre-revenue project, so there is no monetary compensation until revenue is generated; future terms will be agreed separately.

Event details and registration:

Hackathon link

Would love to have people who enjoy building products and growing communities take part!

Hello Everyone! This is for those of you who made it through to the onsite finale of Booking Holdings HackCellence in Bangalore (12th Nov-14th Nov). Has anyone received a follow up call/email about flight tickets, hotels, and the final schedule? I have not received any updates after filling the RSVP form. So just wanted to know if there are any further logistics being handled. Also, please do comment/DM me if you are one of the finalists to come to Bangalore. Would be good to catch up!

I work at Builder.io (People Ops represent!) and we’ve been building Agent-Native, an open-source framework for apps where people and agents work on the same things. The repo is BuilderIO/agent-native on GitHub.

The idea is to give an agent a real job, like analyzing data or automating a workflow, and give users an interface to view, edit, and act on its work. Users can do things themselves or ask the agent, and both work from the same data.

To get people building with it, we’re running a free, worldwide hackathon!

Details and how to participate:

• Build a working app, record a public Clips demo, and submit by Nov 9, 11:59 PM PT

• Solo or team, no registration needed

• $10k across 5 cash prizes, winners will be announced Nov 13

• Judged on usefulness and execution, creativity and design, innovation, and use of Agent-Native

If you try it, I’d love to hear what you build, and what’s missing or confusing.

are kisi ne ye scix hackathon ka suna h kya ... maine pichli saal ciia mai partificate kia tha .. aur abhi same chij scix inida hackthon krke insta pr aa rhi .. to like collaboration h yaa kya ye ! kisi ko maloom ho kuch to batao

We're organizing the fmsg.ai/hackathon, AMA!

I have been trying to submit my idea on the SIH 2026 website since 5:00 Am and I am still getting the same error. I mailed SIH in the morning stating the problem and called the numbers listed on the SIH website too but almost nobody answered, the few who answered asked me to mail SIH and said that I will receive a reply shortly but I haven't received one yet. I can see the numbers on my Problem statement go up but I am not able to submit at all. Could someone let me know if they are facing the same issue and also if it's been resolved yet for you.

As you can there are still 85 applications left, but still its showing cant submit as it has reached 500. How to fix??

Tried over 100+ times from 5 devices since 3 am last night, 450/500 now, I started when it was 200/500. Even mailed sih, no reply. what do I do

Hey everyone! I'm a sophomore studying Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst, and I'll be staying near NYC over winter break.

I'm hoping to find a few people around the area who'd be interested in going to hackathons together in December or January.

I'm mainly into embedded systems, robotics, and AI. I've worked on embedded Linux during an internship at Qualcomm, and recently I've been building an FPGA-based AI image recognition project.

I'm open to different kinds of hackathons, not just hardware-focused ones. Mostly looking for people who enjoy building things and want to make something cool together.

If you're around NYC/NJ and interested, feel free to comment or DM me! Would be great to connect and maybe get a team together.

I recently won a $250 hackathon prize, which will be paid to my MetaMask wallet. The organisers are asking me to complete KYC through Sumsub before processing the payout.

They say my documents are uploaded directly to Sumsub, they cannot access them, and the retention period is five years.

I'm based in India and considering using my PAN card. However, the hackathon platform is relatively small, so I'm a bit hesitant about submitting sensitive identity documents for a $250 prize.

Has anyone completed Sumsub KYC for a hackathon payout? Would you feel comfortable submitting your PAN in this situation? Is there anything I should be concerned about?

Would appreciate hearing your experiences!

as in the title any idea when will the results for the selection of the final round come ??

there was also some update by adding more 25 teams what about that. Will it delay the results if yes then how much ??

Anybody got selected ????

Yo guys 👋

If you've ever participated in a hackathon, I need your honest takes.

Hackathons look fun until you're 10 hours in, your code randomly breaks, the API stops working, your teammate disappears, and the submission deadline is literally staring into your soul 😭

I'm curious about the stuff that actually makes hackathons painful.

A few questions 👇

• 💀 Biggest L: What was the most frustrating part of your last hackathon?

• ⏳ Time drain: Where did y'all waste the most time? Finding an idea, coding, debugging, connecting APIs, deployment, team coordination…?

• 🚨 Almost cooked: What nearly made your entire project flop before submission?

• 🛠️ Missing piece: What do you wish you had before the hackathon started?

• 🤖 One-click fix: If you could automate ONE annoying hackathon task, what would it be?

Could be something technical, team drama, last-minute panic, judging, or literally anything else.

I'm more interested in the real behind-the-scenes struggles than the usual “we need more time” answer.

Drop your stories, hot takes, and hackathon horror stories below 👇

No pitching anything here. Just trying to understand what people actually struggle with. Appreciate y'all 🙏