Top tech and startup stories to start your day with

Why VS Code Uses Two Different Python Environments and How to Fix It

VS Code independently tracks two separate Python environments: one used by the Python extension for IntelliSense and linting, and another used by the integrated terminal based on the shell's active state. These two can easily fall out of sync, causing situations where IntelliSense resolves packages correctly but the terminal throws a ModuleNotFoundError, or vice versa. Users can check the active interpreter via the Status Bar and compare it against the terminal's Python path using 'which python' on macOS/Linux or 'where python' on Windows. Switching the interpreter in VS Code does not update already-open terminal panels, so opening a fresh terminal is necessary for the change to take effect. If auto-activation still fails in the new terminal, manually activating the virtual environment resolves the mismatch.

iPhone 17 price hiked after iPhone 18 pro launch

Mallya Claims Banks Recovered Over Rs 14,000 Cr, Calls Legal Pursuit Unjust

Fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya, currently residing in London, has publicly questioned the ongoing legal proceedings against him over dues linked to his now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines. Mallya argued that banks have already recovered more than Rs 14,000 crore, citing what he described as an Enforcement Directorate affidavit filed before the Bombay High Court. He alleged that the ED itself had confirmed both the recovery and the transfer of these funds to the concerned banks. Based on this claim, Mallya contended that continuing legal action against him amounts to an injustice. His remarks came as part of his broader effort to defend his position in the long-running bank dues case.

GitHub Reports Five Service Degradation Incidents in August 2026

GitHub experienced a total of five incidents during August 2026 that affected the performance of its services. The company disclosed the issues as part of its regular monthly availability reporting. Each incident resulted in degraded performance across various GitHub platforms and tools. The report was published on the official GitHub Blog as part of the company's transparency efforts around service reliability.

Training a 3.8B LLM to 0.384 CORE for $998 – Hugo Vergnes

Article URL: https://hugovergnes.github.io/little-lm-3-8b/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49637435 Points: 3 # Comments: 0

Indian-Origin Couple Gifts $20M to US University for AI College Naming Rights

An Indian-origin couple, Anuradha and Vikas Sinha, has donated $20 million to a US university. In recognition of their contribution, the institution will name a new college after them. The college will be officially called the Anuradha and Vikas Sinha College of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics. The donation reflects growing philanthropic investment by Indian-origin individuals in American higher education, particularly in emerging technology fields.

Varun Chakravarthy says he is only halfway through his cricket career

Indian mystery spinner Varun Chakravarthy has stated that he considers himself only in the first half of his cricket career, having started the sport relatively late. The spinner recently celebrated a T20 World Cup triumph and also recovered from the first muscle injury of his career. Chakravarthy spoke about his rehabilitation process and the role that proper equipment plays in his performance. He also emphasized the importance of continuously upgrading his skills to remain competitive at the highest level. The spinner additionally expressed excitement about the prospect of experiencing the Asian Games sporting village in Japan.

A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming

Article URL: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2026/08/05/a-stupid-idea-for-ai-alignment-we-came-up-with-by-looking-at-the-list-of-specification-gaming-behaviours/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49637395 Points: 2 # Comments: 0

Interactive Tool Visualizes Relativity by Slowing Light to Walking Speed

A developer has released an interactive visualization that scales the speed of light down to 5 km/h, roughly equivalent to a human walking pace. The project aims to make relativistic effects — such as time dilation and length contraction — intuitively understandable using everyday scenarios. The tool represents a first version, shared publicly by its creator on Hacker News. It received 16 upvotes and sparked a small discussion thread among users interested in physics education and visualization.

Vanna AI Archived on GitHub: What It Means for Teams Using It in Production

The vanna-ai/vanna repository, a popular text-to-SQL open-source tool with 23,800 GitHub stars, was archived by its owner on 29 March 2026, making it permanently read-only. While existing deployments continue to function for now, archiving halts all dependency updates, security patches, and community-driven bug fixes, meaning a breaking change in an underlying library such as SQLAlchemy or an LLM SDK could render it unusable within months. Vanna bundled five distinct capabilities — a training store, schema retrieval, prompt assembly, LLM calls, and UI helpers — and no single maintained library currently replicates all five together. A key risk when replacing its retrieval layer is a silent authorization failure: if the replacement is not identity-aware, a language model may generate valid SQL against restricted tables, receive empty results due to row-level security, and confidently report that no data exists rather than flagging an access denial. Teams are advised to pin their current Vanna version, export training data, and explicitly test how their system responds when a restricted user queries data they are not permitted to see.

Missouri congressional map back at US SC

DEV Community Spam Comment Traced to Affiliate Marketing Scheme via Fake Domain

A developer investigated a spam comment posted on their DEV Community article in September 2025, which contained a TinyURL linking to a throwaway domain called zenviapro.store. Using curl commands to trace redirects without clicking, they found the link ultimately led to LoopCV, a legitimate job-application automation SaaS, with an affiliate tracking code appended. The intermediary domain had no real website and consisted of a single Express.js route that redirected all traffic regardless of query parameters. The account behind the comment used a faker.js-generated name and a 19th-century wombat engraving as its profile image. The investigator estimated the operation only needs three paying referrals per year to break even, concluding that the low cost makes such spam economically self-sustaining.

20 Cats Found Dead and Mutilated in Mumbai's Chembur; Police Launch Probe

Nearly 20 cats have been discovered dead and mutilated in the Panjrapole locality of Chembur, Mumbai. The incidents prompted local authorities to register a First Information Report (FIR) in connection with the killings. Police have launched a formal investigation to identify those responsible. The repeated nature of the killings in the same area has raised serious concerns among residents and animal welfare advocates.

Apple Watch Series 12 Pre-Orders Open in India, Available from September 18

Apple has launched pre-orders for the Watch Series 12 across multiple markets, including India. The smartwatch will be available in stores starting September 18. The device is priced from Rs 56,900 in the Indian market. Notably, the hypertension notification feature, highlighted as a key health addition, will not be available to Indian users at launch.

5 dead, many missing as Philippines ferry catches fire

‘Flames engulfed vessel’: 5 killed, 87 missing in Philippines ferry fire; key points

Hobbyist Developer Builds Multilayer Perceptron From Scratch Using Julia

A self-taught machine learning enthusiast has documented their journey learning ML concepts and implementing a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) from scratch without professional guidance. After completing two Udacity Nanodegree programs in AI and Deep Learning, the author felt unsatisfied with their understanding of the underlying mathematics and decided to derive it independently. They manually worked out the calculus for both the feed-forward and back-propagation phases, then implemented the algorithms in Julia — a high-level programming language — on both CPU and GPU. The author chose to build an MLP rather than a more complex neural network because they limited themselves to implementing only what they could first prove mathematically. A follow-up post is planned covering data augmentation techniques and image processing functions such as rotations and distortions.

Claude Code Config Keys Can Silently Fail If Placed in the Wrong Settings File

A developer discovered that certain Claude Code configuration keys, including autoMode, have no effect when placed in a project-level .claude/settings.json file, producing no errors or warnings. Claude Code's settings reference defines 223 configuration keys, of which 71 are scope-restricted, meaning they only work from specific files such as the user-level ~/.claude/settings.json or managed settings. The silent failure made debugging difficult, as valid JSON and startup logs gave no indication that the keys were being ignored. The developer found their own manually maintained list of scoped keys was missing an entire category — 23 'user or managed' keys, including autoMode. In response, they built an open-source CLI checker, ccheck, that warns users when a config key is placed in a file where it has no effect.

Masked UK protesters target Pakistan U-19 cricket team in asylum seeker mix-up

A group of masked protesters gathered outside a Portsmouth hotel, mistakenly believing it housed asylum seekers. The hotel was in fact accommodating members of Pakistan's Under-19 cricket team, who were in the city for a tour. A local councillor intervened to clarify the misunderstanding, after which the protesters dispersed. The incident unfolded against a backdrop of growing tensions in Portsmouth over asylum seeker arrivals. The England and Wales Cricket Board has since launched a security review for the visiting Pakistani squad.