Banks closed in several states on Aug 26 for Id-E-Milad and Thiruvonam

Several bank branches across India will remain closed on Wednesday, August 26, in observance of the Id-E-Milad and Thiruvonam festivals. The closures are region-specific, affecting states where these festivals are officially recognized as public holidays. Customers can still access banking services through ATMs and online platforms during the holiday. Additionally, banks will be shut on August 28 for Raksha Bandhan and again on August 30 for the regular weekly Sunday holiday.

Centre approves 3.8 lakh PMAY homes worth Rs 5,000 crore for flood-hit Assam

The central government has approved housing assistance under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana for flood-affected families in Assam, allocating nearly Rs 5,000 crore for the construction of approximately 3.8 lakh homes. An additional Rs 139 crore has been earmarked to boost agricultural investment in the region. The dual-pronged package aims to help displaced residents rebuild their lives while also strengthening the local farming sector. The initiative is part of a broader effort to build long-term resilience in communities repeatedly impacted by flooding in Assam.

Iran Blacklists 45 Ships, Including Indian and Pakistani Vessels, Over Hormuz Rules

Iran has blacklisted 45 ships, including vessels from India and Pakistan, accusing them of violating transit rules in the Strait of Hormuz. The Islamic Republic has threatened to confiscate any ships found breaching these regulations. An AFP data analysis revealed that roughly one-third of the blacklisted vessels have already been attacked during the ongoing Middle East conflict. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical global shipping chokepoint, making such tensions particularly significant for international trade and energy supply chains.

Fragmented Project Files Hide Decision History and Cause Team Confusion

When a project spans multiple tools, critical context — like why a pricing model changed — often gets buried across disconnected files. By the end of a typical work week, a team may have a research doc, spreadsheet, slide deck, interface sketch, and chat log with no clear record of their order or relationship. This fragmentation means no team member can easily tell which decision overrides another or trace the reasoning behind key choices. The gap between where decisions are made and where their rationale lives is a common source of rework and confusion. Consolidating work into a single shared space where each file retains its history could help teams avoid losing context as projects evolve.

A US-Canada trade war could leave world worse off

Vembu has a precious advice for techies, docs

Developer Documents 369 Verified Merged Pull Requests Across 33 External GitHub Repos

Developer Aniruddha Adak has publicly documented 369 verified pull requests merged into external GitHub repositories across 33 projects, spanning from January 2024 to August 2026. The figure is derived from a total of 398 lifetime merged pull requests, with 29 self-owned repository merges excluded from the count. Of his 918 total pull requests submitted, fewer than half were merged, a rate he describes as normal for open-source contribution. The bulk of his merges — 306 — came in 2024 during high-volume participation including Hacktoberfest, while 2025 and 2026 saw fewer but more substantial contributions to widely used production tools. All 369 merges are individually linked and independently verifiable via the GitHub search API.

NASA's $4B Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Set for Florida Launch

NASA is preparing to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a mission valued at approximately $4 billion. The launch is scheduled for Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The telescope is designed to investigate key cosmic mysteries, including the study of exoplanets and dark energy. Roman is expected to significantly advance our understanding of the universe's structure and expansion.

Fire at Islamabad Hospital Kills 15 Newborns in Pakistan

A fire broke out at a hospital in Islamabad, Pakistan, resulting in the deaths of 15 newborns. The incident occurred in the Pakistani capital, making it a tragedy of significant scale. The fire affected a ward housing newborn infants at the medical facility. Further details regarding the cause of the fire and the timeline of events have not been confirmed in the available information.

Adani Energy wins Rs 4,700 crore Maha project

Why Skilled Engineers Still Fail Coding Interviews: The Scorecard Problem

Strong engineers often fail coding interviews not because of poor coding ability, but because they produce little scoreable evidence for interviewers to document. Interviewers evaluate candidates across multiple rubric axes — problem solving, coding, communication, and judgment — each requiring specific, quotable observations. A silent but perfect solution leaves an interviewer with almost no written evidence, while a narrated, imperfect attempt can yield far more scoreable signals. Common failure modes include solving problems without verbalizing assumptions or tradeoffs, and tackling senior-level prompts without demonstrating judgment about edge cases or production risks. Candidates improve their chances by thinking aloud in transcribable sentences that explicitly cover assumptions, tradeoffs, complexity, and test cases.

Why AI assistant schema catalogs break down weeks after launch

When teams build AI assistants to query their databases, they must create a schema catalog — a structured representation of table names, columns, types, and relationships — that sits between the assistant and the database. Most teams build this catalog quickly, often the same weekend they set up the assistant, and it works well initially. Rather than granting the AI direct production access, teams typically build an intermediate layer using approaches such as JSON files, nightly refresh scripts, custom MCP servers, semantic layers, or read-only replicas. While each method works at launch, the catalog tends to decay silently as the underlying database changes, causing quality issues that compound over time. The core challenge is that teams focus heavily on the connection layer — credentials and query costs — while neglecting the knowledge layer, which is where the assistant's actual usefulness lives.

Developer Seeks Feedback on First Blog Post About Logical Volume Management

A developer has launched a personal blog and portfolio site at mvtechblog.com, publishing their first post on Logical Volume Management. The author is new to documenting technical work and is seeking constructive feedback from the community. They are specifically looking for input on content quality, clarity, and writing style. Additionally, they want to know whether the post functions effectively as both a blog entry and a portfolio piece before continuing to write more.

How Agentic RAG Pipelines Use Real-Time Web Search to Fill Knowledge Gaps

An agentic RAG pipeline reframes retrieval as a dynamic tool that an AI agent can invoke, assess, and repeat, rather than a fixed one-time step. Unlike traditional RAG systems, which follow a rigid retrieve-then-generate path, agentic pipelines allow the model to decide when internal knowledge is sufficient and when to fall back on real-time web search. The system first queries an internal vector database, then triggers a web search API only if the retrieved evidence is missing, outdated, or weak. Internal documents and live web results are normalized into a shared evidence format before an answer is generated, with sources, URLs, and publication dates preserved for citation. Key evaluation criteria for such pipelines include retrieval quality, citation accuracy, web-search precision, latency, cost, and the agent's stopping behavior.

₹79L more at retirement? Small monthly VPF pays big

Carney, the ex-CenBanker who said 'no' to Trump

How UPI Transformed India Into a Digital Payments Powerhouse

India's Unified Payments Interface, commonly known as UPI, has fundamentally changed the way citizens and businesses conduct financial transactions. The system has driven widespread financial inclusion by bringing millions of previously unbanked individuals into the digital economy. UPI's rapid adoption has reshaped commerce across the country, from street vendors to large retailers. The platform's success has positioned India as a global leader in fintech innovation.

How to Apply Excel Cell Background Colors and Gradients Using C#

Developers can programmatically style Excel cell backgrounds using the free Spire.XLS for .NET library, installable via NuGet. The library supports three background types: solid fills for headers and highlights, texture patterns for subtle category distinction, and gradient fills for modern dashboard visuals. Each style requires setting the FillPattern property correctly before applying colors, as skipping this step causes color changes to be ignored. Bulk styling of cell ranges is also supported, making it faster and cleaner than looping through individual cells. The guide provides ready-to-use C# code examples for all three background styles along with key tips on color precedence and custom RGB values.

Developer finds own month-old functions as misunderstood as unfamiliar third-party APIs

A developer maintaining qbofile, a browser-based accounting file converter, encountered three self-inflicted bugs in three days caused by misremembering the return values of his own functions. In one case, a CSV generator was missing a category column the parser produced; in another, a memo field silently overwrote the payee slot due to an upstream variable definition. A third near-miss revealed that two recently written utility functions returned complex objects rather than the simple values their names implied. The developer concluded that function names act as summaries written before the code was finished and can be misleading even to their author. He now applies the same habit to his own modules that he uses with external libraries: reading what a function actually returns before wiring it to anything else.

India Q1 growth likely slowed to 7.1%: Reuters poll