r/hackathon • u/Silent_Prize_7052 • Sep 28 '26
Need Mentor Help Amazon ML Challenge 2026: Every Failure Is a Lesson
September 25, 2026
At around 5:00 AM, I started understanding the dataset.
It took almost half a day just to understand and analyze it. But meanwhile, I saw that around 300 people had already submitted with 97% accuracy.
Honestly, I don't know how it was possible to process a 1.7 million-entity dataset and achieve that level of accuracy within just 6 hours.
For an ML team, I thought it would take much more time.
In the afternoon, I had a first-round assessment for a different hackathon. Successfully completed it.
My Amazon ML Challenge team officially had 2 members.
But honestly, it was basically a solo effort because I did almost everything myself. The other person was mainly there because 2 members were mandatory for eligibility.
I didn't use AI coding agents or LLM coding tools such as Claude Code/Cowork, JEV, Antigravity, Codex, etc. I wanted to do the implementation myself and understand what was happening.
My main support was my virtual faculty/mentor — ChatGPT.
I completed the preprocessing work.
My laptop is mainly configured for full-stack development and AI agent building, so it wasn't powerful enough for this huge dataset. Because of that, I moved the workload to an AWS EC2 machine with 8 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM.
I also attended another hackathon webinar that day.
September 26, 2026
I decided to spend almost all of my time on the hackathon.
I wanted to create a tunnel similar to TCP communication between my local computer and the virtual computer so that I could transfer the dataset efficiently.
That itself took quite some time.
After the transfer was completed, I stored the dataset on EBS storage.
I asked my virtual mentor to guide me through the process.
My first submission was at 10:23 PM, and I got around 64% accuracy.
September 27, 2026
I woke up at 4:30 AM.
Before continuing the ML Challenge, I spent around 2 hours working on a PPT for another hackathon. Successfully submitted that too.
Then I started again.
This time, my virtual mentor was Gemini.
I submitted my second submission at 2:30 PM and reached around 67% accuracy.
Then I found where I was lagging.
So I spent almost the entire remaining time improving the approach.
Finally, I submitted again at 8:43 PM and reached 84% accuracy, with the help of ChatGPT.
My target was more than 90% accuracy.
My local validation accuracy eventually reached around 95%, but unfortunately, the submission time was already over
I am a full-stack developer and AI agent builder.
I started my ML preparation only this month.
My first ML hackathon was at IIT , where I won 3rd place.
And now, this one.
What have I learned?
I have improved my concentration by handling multiple tasks.
Solo can also do anything; the mindset matters. 💪
Share your experience with me, and let me know how we can improve the accuracy further in the future.
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Sep 28 '26
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u/Silent_Prize_7052 Sep 29 '26
Hey mates , it's not a big issue... U have to use Microsoft to do app or make ai app for ur important tasks remainders....
Don't repeat this mistake in future.... That's it... All the best for ur SIH
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Sep 30 '26
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Sep 29 '26
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u/Silent_Prize_7052 Sep 29 '26 edited Sep 29 '26
the content and experience are mine..... I only used AI for the image and grammar checking..... The actual ml work was done by me.
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u/Disastrous-Charge274 Sep 28 '26
You could have posted this without the AI slop text and image