Ishan Pande

Engineering @ AWS, ex-Postmates. CMU SCS Batch of 2013.
Tweets are my own, don't represent my employer.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Almost everyone I know seems skeptical of Indian development. And yet India keeps defying the skeptics.

https://t.co/oFtdPCV6JT

[Rattan Dhillon @ShivrattanDhil1]

Back in 2013, Beijing’s AQI touched 775 a level comparable to what Delhi experiences today.

Fast forward to now, and Beijing claims it has increased life expectancy by nearly two years. (With AQI as of Now is just 18 ) largely by aggressively tackling the sources of pollution rather than just its symptoms.

Here’s what they did:

• Eliminated coal-fired boilers in homes, replacing them with electric heating.

• Cracked down on polluting industries, shutting down or relocating around 6,500 high-emission units, contributing to nearly 46% of the improvement.

• Implemented vehicle restrictions while improving urban planning, aiming to keep homes, schools, and workplaces within 25 km to reduce commuting emissions.

• Stopped crop residue burning in surrounding regions, which reportedly reduced pollution by another 22%.

• Held bureaucrats accountable, linking promotions to pollution-reduction targets and suspending over 18,000 officials for manipulating environmental data.

If Beijing could transform its air quality through decisive policy, enforcement, and accountability, the real question is: why can’t we? ☺️

[Lost Nomad @lost_nomad__]

The Indian economic miracle is real. They have a ways to go before they can become a rich country, but with a GDP per capita growth of almost 7% their trajectory looks incredible

India is a country to watch this century

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

@pitdesi So much for SAASpocalypse 😅
If it's one tool i would've expected to built by AI, it was qualtrics. But it's still around, so there's still value in maintaining software, no matter how shitty it is

[Malte Ubl @cramforce]

She landed us on the moon without
- Coding agents
- Autocomplete
- TypeScript
- CI
- Google
- Web browsers
- Objected oriented programming
- Version control
- Debuggers
- GUIs
- Programming languages
- Compilers
RIP Margaret Hamilton

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

I'm giving away 25 copies of #VIBE. To enter, repost and comment by October 13.

https://t.co/nNUOi5Ny7A

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

@TheLongInvest https://t.co/7EHKhgomjo

[Sana Ebrahimi Ledene @SanaELedene]

Since yesterday I’ve been grilling my husband about the Flydubai incident. He’s a commercial pilot. I threw every conspiracy at him until he snapped.
His exact words: “People already calling this fake is insane.”

So here’s what he said about the three dumbest theories.

1- “How did anyone get into the cockpit? The door locks from the inside.”
There’s a door-release switch right next to the pilot. He can unlock it from the flight deck. Once it’s released, people on the other side can shove it open and get in. Locked does not mean sealed forever.

2- “Why didn’t the oxygen masks drop?”
This isn’t a movie. Masks don’t fall because something scary happened. They deploy only if cabin pressure drops. A steep descent, even a violent one, does not automatically dump cabin pressure. No pressure loss, no masks. Simple as that.

3-“How did people reach the cockpit if the plane was nose-diving?”
“Nose dive” does not mean the jet was vertical. It was pitched down, not at 90 degrees. That attitude doesn’t pin you in your seat. It throws you forward, toward the cockpit. If you get up, you’re not fighting the dive. You’re being shoved down the aisle faster.

That’s it. Not a film. Not a hoax script. Just how the airplane actually works.

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

If you use AI to get to work (Tesla FSD / Waymo) please shout "driven by AI" while entering the office 😂
Wth is this policy, anyone can tell when something is AI slop, but by all means, use AI if it helps with grammar etc.

[Dylan Field @zoink]

Figma’s policy: if you use AI in your writing process, add “written with AI” at the top.

[sushma date @sushmadate]

These men speak for me, and lakhs of Punekars like me, who want to celebrate our festivals in peace without creating any nuisance on the roads and public places
We just happen to be the most neglected vote bank.
Ban DJs and Dolby in public places - why is this so hard to implement?

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

@Loganullyott This is such a self own by @Jason 😂 the hypocrisy of the lot who suggested we need more talented folks who study in the US, highly skilled folks to get a visa. Look where were now 🤦

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

@Jason While i agree AI slop weakens writing, if the person puts their name on it, you've to assume they agree with what's written. Why don't we apply the same lens to other tasks using AI? Would you look down upon code written with AI? AI driven cars?

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Airbnb deletes negative reviews so everything is always 4.7

Google Maps removes negative reviews in many countries as defamation so everything is always a 4.7

Booking sites want you to book so will also happily remove negative reviews for their hotels so everything is always a 4.7

I made a site called https://t.co/4p4dzTDVN6 (or https://t.co/A1nzVE5AlD whatever you prefer, I have both!)

It gets ratings from all booking platforms, normalizes them to show the actual score (eg a booking site where most hotels are always between 4 and 4.7 means you can normalize that to a 0 and 5)

It also uses AI vision models to rate hotels based on how they look

And it browses the internet for actual experiences (think blogs and Reddit posts) to get the real opinion about them outside reviews

And it's starting to work, I just stayed in this beautiful boutique apartment hotel called Woo Suites in Athens for $400/night. Clean, nice minimalist interior, working cold AC, central, excellent staff, great healthy breakfast, and we found it through Hotelist!

It's free, I don't make any money on it (actually I lose thousands per month on it to collect data via APIs and web scrapers) and there's no affiliate money bs like other booking sites (they will increase ranking of hotels if they pay sites a higher commission!)

https://t.co/4p4dzTDVN6

Tell your friends please!!!!!! 🙏

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

@sriramkri +1 attention span increased after removing insta. Went back to reading books and pursuing hobbies. Trying to get off X, but it's not that addictive. Also a fellow @ManUtd fan 😂

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

1/ I'm a cardiologist. I've practiced for twenty-five years, through a lot of "breakthroughs" that turned out to be press releases. So understand the weight of what I'm about to say: I have never seen a single week in medicine like the one we just lived through.
In the span of a few days, four separate scientific breakthroughs landed. The stock market treated them as four unrelated stories and sent a handful of biotech companies soaring. But that's the shallow read. Look closer and they are not four stories at all. They are four faces of the same story — the biggest shift in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics.

Medicine is becoming programmable. Individualized. Written for one human being instead of the average of millions.

Let me walk you through exactly what happened, in plain language, and show you where this is actually headed. Because the future arrived quietly this week, and most people scrolled right past it.

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

This is the new India! Amongst all the negativity, we need to highlight this side of India, builders gonna build. 🇮🇳🚀

[Aditya Agarwal @adityaag]

This is remarkably well done.

And of course featuring our very own @shreepoorna365.

Let's go.

[xanax @donttouchxanax]

An Indian institute filmed a professor teaching classical physics with no notes, no slides, and a green board. Almost nobody outside India watches it.

This is Classical Physics, lecture 1, taught by V. Balakrishnan at IIT Madras, published free by NPTEL, India's national open courseware programme.

Balakrishnan taught at IIT Madras for decades. Students who sat in that room describe the same thing: the whole subject held in his head, delivered in order, no paper on the podium.

Lecture 1 is the introduction. What classical mechanics claims, where the claims hold, and the exact points where they stop holding and quantum takes over.

Watch how he speaks. Complete sentences, no filler, each idea finished before the next begins. Rare in any lecture hall on any continent.

A physicist I know worked through the whole NPTEL series and rates it above the western courses he paid for.

Free on YouTube, 17 years online, low resolution, no marketing.

The teaching was never concentrated in the famous universities.

[Bhooshan Shukla @docbhooshan]

multiple choice questions are not a great way to assess eligibility of entry to professional colleges.

In a fundamentally unequal society-system, with 12,000,000 youngsters competing for few thousand college places, MCQs are the LEAST bad option. (Like our democracy).

Engineering entrance is fully computerised and most importantly- has huge number of questions that need "solving".

Medical entrance exam (till now) is paper based. Almost all questions are memory based. Few with logical thinking and even fewer questions need solving. Some great scholar decided that math is not needed in medicine !

These fundamental differences (fully computerised & problem solving) tell you why NEET exam is every year's controversy and JEE goes without a whimper.

Unless THIS changes, nothing will change.

Do we have ministers and bureaucrats who understand this and have what it takes to change this?

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

Lets celebrate these kids. I remember during my batch, one of my school friends won a bronze at the IMO, almost nobody at the time had the awareness and level of encouragement for him. These kids are incredible, celebrate them!

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

I taught JEE physics for years. That paper breaks strong kids in three hours.

This exam is five hours of theory and five hours of lab work, and these five did close to perfect scores on it.

Let me tell you what actually happened.

The International Physics Olympiad is the world championship of school physics. It was the 56th edition. Held in Bucaramanga, Colombia, from July 5 to 12.

381 students. More than 85 countries. Every one of them the best physics student their country could find.

India sent five kids.

All five came back with gold.

Their names are Kanishk Jain from Pune. Riddhesh Anant Bendale from Indore. Rishit Garg from Dwarka in Delhi. Shresth Suraiya from Mumbai. Svarit Joshi from Ahmedabad.

We know a hundred cricketers by their nickname and not one of these boys. :)

That clean sweep put India at joint World Number One. Tied with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Those are countries that pour serious money and national pride into science education. We are standing level with them.

Now here is what the exam actually was.

Two papers. Each five hours long.

The theory paper had three problems. One on the thermodynamics of paramagnetic cooling. One on the photoionisation of ozone. One on the dynamics of electron positron pairs.

The experimental paper was another five hours in a lab, working through heat transfer and thermodynamic processes in fluids.

That means you get given equipment you have never seen, and you have to design your own experiment, take your own readings, handle the errors, and reach a real answer.

Not multiple choice. No shortcuts. No pattern recognition. You either understand physics or you sit there for five hours.

HBCSE says the Indian students were near perfect on theory and excellent on the practical too.

Now, this was India's 27th appearance at the IPhO.

Across all those years, about 44 percent of Indian students have won gold, 41 percent silver, 10 percent bronze.

In the last ten years, every single Indian student has come home with a medal. 62 percent gold, 38 percent silver.

Not one kid has gone and come back empty handed in a decade.

Five golds in one year has happened only twice. This year, and in 2018.

So who built this.

The programme is run by HBCSE, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. It sits under TIFR, which sits under the Department of Atomic Energy.

They run the whole funnel. A national exam, then a national olympiad, then a brutal selection and training camp, and out of everyone in the country, five kids get on a plane.

The team was led by Professor Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr Leena Joshi from St Xavier's College, Mumbai.

The scientific observers were Professor Ananda Dasgupta from IISER Kolkata and Nisha Kelkar from Gogate-Joglekar College in Ratnagiri.

Yes. Ratnagiri. A college in a small coastal town in Maharashtra.

This is public education doing something the private coaching industry could never do on its own.

The coaching industry is very good at one thing. Teaching you to solve a known problem fast.

That is what JEE and NEET reward, and I say that with love because I was part of that world.

But an olympiad paper does not have a known type. There is no shortcut chapter. There is no formula sheet that saves you. You have to sit with a problem you have never seen and think.

That is a completely different muscle. And a government funded centre has been quietly building it in Indian teenagers for 27 years.

So yes, be proud. Loudly.

HBCSE also shared that around 64 percent of India's olympiad medallists go on to do a PhD.

But only about 32 percent of medallists end up settling in India.

I do not say that to spoil the moment. These kids owe the country nothing. They earned every option they have.

But it should tell us something. We are excellent at finding this talent. We are excellent at training it. We are still not great at giving it somewhere worth staying.

Congratulations Kanishk, Riddhesh, Rishit, Shresth and Svarit. This is one of the best things an Indian did this year and most of the country will never hear about it.

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

@Niva_Bupa you have such a pathetic service. How can you reject cashless claims directly without even raising a query? Especially when the patient is critical in ICU?! This is for a 8 year old policy without any claims in the past 6 years!

[Ishan Pande @ipande]

@ShivAroor @kunalb11 Auto reply - Happy "Birthday/Anniversary etc etc" whenever someone wishes in a whatapp group 😂