Praveenstein

Mechanical engineer turned software engineer at UST Global. Tweeting about work, books, personal life experiences and Tamil ❤️

[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.

[Praveenstein @praveenstein]

@rajshamani Lol, seen that before

[Raj Shamani @rajshamani]

Your brain loves a dramatic plot more than a peaceful life. You will actively destroy a stable relationship or a good job just to manufacture a crisis that makes you feel like the main character again.

[Tech with Mak @techNmak]

An 82K-star GitHub repo is built around one painfully obvious idea:

Your coding agent should map the codebase once, not grep it forever.

Graphify turns an entire project into a queryable knowledge graph.

Functions, classes, files, SQL schemas, infrastructure, docs, PDFs, images and videos become connected nodes that an agent can traverse instead of repeatedly opening files and reconstructing the architecture.

So instead of:
→ search for authentication
→ open twelve files
→ follow imports manually
→ lose the trail as the context fills up

The agent can ask:
> What connects authentication to the database?
> Trace the path from UserService to DatabasePool.
> Explain RateLimiter.
> Which concepts does everything flow through?

Graphify returns the relevant subgraph and the path connecting the concepts, not another list of keyword matches.

For source code, this is not RAG:
→ No embeddings
→ No vector database
→ No LLM required
→ Code is parsed locally using tree-sitter
→ Calls, imports and inheritance become graph edges

Every relationship is also marked as EXTRACTED, INFERRED, or AMBIGUOUS, so the agent can distinguish what exists explicitly in the source from what Graphify resolved or guessed.

The cleverest part is what happens next.

Graphify can install hooks or persistent instructions for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot and 20+ other assistants.

Before the agent starts blindly grepping or reading files one by one, it is nudged to query the existing graph first.

The graph can be committed to Git, automatically rebuilt after commits, shared across the team and exposed through MCP.

Long context windows help agents read more code.

A persistent knowledge graph helps them know where to look.

The next improvement in coding agents may not come from stuffing more files into the prompt.

It may come from making them stop rereading the repository.

Here's the GitHub Repo: https://t.co/4ify3X8urp

[Vetri Maaran @Dir_Vetrimaaran]

#தமிழ்முருகன் https://t.co/TnLueDM1iU

[Praveenstein @praveenstein]

@rom1trs What's the prompt?

[Math Cafe @Riazi_Cafe_en]

"Problem-Solving Strategies"
by Arthur Engel

One of the most popular books among students preparing for math competitions.

https://t.co/xEn5walLZX

[James Clear @JamesClear]

Learn to love the interruptions. Find the fun in the delay, the humor in the challenge, the pleasure in the daily commute.

A great deal of life is spent dealing with interruptions and waiting for the conditions to turn. We think, "If I can just get past this, then things will open up." But the interruption is not standing between you and your life. It is your life.

Yes, I prefer hassle-free days too. But you'll rarely find a situation that is all bad. There are little pockets of joy folded inside the annoyances we face. There is always fun to be had, if you go looking for it.

This is one of the arts of living. It's the art of enjoying the imperfect days. It's the art of making all the moments count.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

A reminder from Atomic Habits by James Clear:

“It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process is to guarantee disappointment.”

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Marcus Aurelius wrote this over 1800 years ago:

“Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once.”

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Tolstoy’s advice to achieve a long term goal:

[Sebastián Ramírez @tiangolo]

I might not have enough experience to apply to some @FastAPI jobs, but at least it now has 100k GitHub stars. ✨

Thank you for letting me build this. 🙌

🍰☕️

[Praveenstein @praveenstein]

@CuriosityonX Which book is this?

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

Why is calculus not introduced this way in schools?

[Praveenstein @praveenstein]

@asmah2107 You can outsource your thinking, but cannot outsource your understanding

[divyansh @Divyansh91565]

Starting a Number Theory series on my account..

I've divided the major Competitive Programming Number Theory topics into 5 modules.

I'll post 5 in-depth articles.. no mugging up, just first principles, core derivations, and intuition behind everything.

New article every Friday at 7 PM.

Will complete the whole series this month only.

Stay tuned. 🤙

[Praveenstein @praveenstein]

@Priyansh_31Dec Any advice for people who is at 32 and have never done CP? Is it too late for them?

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

James Clear: The ability to bounce back quickly is a key skill in life.

[James Clear @JamesClear]

Why is improvement hard?

Part of the issue is everyone wants to improve, but nobody wants to destroy. Change often requires destruction. Or, at least, unlearning.

Let's call it gentle elimination. You may have to leave little habits, update current beliefs, eliminate comfortable patterns. When you want better outcomes, your daily norms may need to change. The process of improvement is not just about adding things you like.

Sometimes habits and patterns belong to who you were, not who you are trying to be. If you'd like something better, then a routine you are comfortable with may have to die.

[James Clear @JamesClear]

Your first attempt might not be very good, but nobody's early work is good. There will always be a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And the bridge between that gap is courage. The courage to look foolish in the beginning. The courage to show up again when your early work is criticized. The courage to look yourself in the mirror and say, "I realize I'm not good enough yet, but the only way to get better is to keep working on it."