Prabhat Sharma

Just an average guy pushing bugs to production! Currently @aws Prev @github 🎓 @iitroorkee

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

Missing claude more than my ex :(

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@raberhalex @system_monarch @Atlassian But Alex I feel you’re being too harsh. The post had good intentions of educating people. Its just that it could’ve been worded better to be more precise, that its more about better traffic distribution heuristics which may/maynot lead to better load distribution

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@raberhalex @system_monarch @Atlassian Went through previous thread. I got your point. The original post and the authors reply later to you are infact contradictory in a sense that original post stated LB are unaware of server load whereas the latter reply states LB are in fact feedback aware through server metrics

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@raberhalex @system_monarch @Atlassian Most out of the box load balancers don’t take into account downstream feedback or more like they can’t since every downstream system is different and require custom feedback loops for backpressure to be in place. Most such underlying systems build their own BP mechanisms

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@Chhokkwangun @RahulEWD If someone is bringing a very small paycheck and doesn’t have the time and bandwidth to do other tasks and the person with the higher paycheck needs to do majority part of it then its unfair to the higher pay check person right?

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@frontierindica This building has internal fire hose, what happened to them?

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@nityasnotes Can you recommend a relatively easier way for a biotech person to learn AI? I’m in CS and my friend is in biotech but she isn’t able to understand AI from the usual CS type courses of AI

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@anirudhology This was helpful, Thanks!

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@anirudhology If safe release prevents A to delete B’s lock then then by the same logic it will prevent B to delete A’s lock, usually for the same operation A and B will try to take a lock on the same key. So, how will B takeover if A hasn’t renewed its lock till TTL since B can’t delete lock?

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

Once such level of corruption seeps into the education system of a country then that country is bound to have a doomed future! Health and education are two things which govt. must aim to keep pristine , you guys have everything else to earn black money.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@peduarte @stolinski Is raycast dictation better than whisperflow?

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@YoniSmolyar If you could travel back in time, would you leave your job much earlier than you did?

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@DevanshuXi If you haven’t watch the errichto youtube video on binary search

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@akkiex007 Hey Akash, is compensation of FDE better than SWE at same level?

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@ThisIsBhandari @Pseudo_Sid26 Wait what’s this 75L clause? Can you explain

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@claudeai when can I expect the site to be up? Got an urgent work stuck in claude design.
I get it you guys want to compete with @github for downtime but let’s do it some other time 🙃

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@0xlelouch_ Even in this summer, the temperature seems pleasant?

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@renegadesilicon @iamtrask Sharing problems publicly will help everyone

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@0xlelouch_ Post tax 10L? Or pre?

[Prabhat Sharma @captain_dredge]

@vishwastam More than the money, I think the personal earning 70lpa won’t get so many holidays for 3-4 international vacations