Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 18-year-old Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, the founder of AI coding agents startup Nozomio, who just completed Y Combinator and raised $6.2 million in funding. The following has been edited for length and clarity.When I was around 11 years old, my dad told me about Y Combinator for the first time. We were on a walk by the river in my hometown of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and I didn’t really understand the concept of a school for founders — but it captured my imagination.Both of my parents are entrepreneurs, and my own journey started young,…
Karishma Mandal wanted to be at the center of the tech world — working in AI at a big-name company in San Francisco. So she moved across the country — and tapped every job search strategy in her toolbox, hoping to land an offer.Mandal’s career journey — which would include interviews at Uber, Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce — began when she moved to the US from India in 2021 to pursue a master’s in engineering management at Northwestern University. After graduating in January 2023, she began working full-time in March of that year as a product manager at a consulting…
NEW YORK (AP) — A new report on book bans in U.S. schools finds Stephen King as the author most likely to be censored and the country divided between states actively restricting works and those attempting to limit or eliminate bans.PEN America’s “Banned in the USA,” released Wednesday, tracks more than 6,800 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago, when PEN didn’t even see the need to compile a report.Some 80% of…
On Wednesday, Wikimedia Deutschland announced a new database that will make Wikipedia’s wealth of knowledge more accessible to AI models. Called the Wikidata Embedding Project, the system applies a vector-based semantic search — a technique that helps computers understand the meaning and relationships between words — to the existing data on Wikipedia and its sister platforms, consisting of nearly 120 million entries. Combined with new support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that helps AI systems communicate with data sources, the project makes the data more accessible to natural language queries from LLMs. The project was undertaken by…
Roger Federer leads the list of nominees announced Wednesday for the International Tennis Hall of Fame’s class of 2026. He was the first man to win 20 Grand Slam singles titles and ushered in an era of unprecedented greatness with younger rivals Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.With a terrific forehand and serve, an attacking, all-court style and footwork that helped make everything seem so effortless, Federer won 103 trophies and 1,251 matches in singles, totals surpassed among men only by Jimmy Connors in the Open era, which began in 1968.Federer finished five seasons at No. 1 in the ATP rankings,…
MIAMI (AP) — Not even half of the spots in the 48-team field have been claimed. The schedule of matches won’t be finalized until December. And other than host nations U.S., Canada and Mexico, nobody has any idea where or when they’ll be playing.Millions of soccer fans worldwide evidently don’t seem to mind any of those points.Tickets to next year’s FIFA World Cup officially go on sale Wednesday. The buyers will be those who were selected, out of 4.5 million applicants in a lottery that took place last month, to have the first formal chance to purchase tickets over the…
Fancy a job at the messaging service Telegram? You might want to look out for the next coding competition the company organizes to recruit engineers.Pavel Durov, the cofounder and CEO of Telegram, said in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, which aired on Tuesday, that he prefers to assess candidates through a coding contest instead of the standard interview process.”It’s in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress,” Durov said.”If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than…
Goncalo Ramos struck a 90th-minute winner as Paris Saint-Germain sealed a statement win over Barcelona in the Champions League on Wednesday.Trailing 1-0 at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys and without injured star forwards Ousmane Dembele, Desire Doue and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, defending champion PSG fought back for a 2-1 victory against one of the favorites to lift the trophy in May.“It doesn’t matter which of our players are in the team. When they are wearing our shirt, carrying our badge on their shirt, then the amount of attitude and effort is non-negotiable,” PSG coach Luis Enrique said. Manchester City had to…
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Planned Parenthood on Tuesday shuttered its two clinics in Louisiana over what the organization said were mounting financial and political challenges that made operating in the state no longer possible after more than 40 years.The closures make Louisiana the most populous of just four states with no Planned Parenthood locations.The exit underlines the pressures on Planned Parenthood as it warns of wider closures nationwide in the face of Medicaid funding cuts in President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill. The organization is also halting advocacy work in Louisiana, where the state’s Republican leaders have cheered…
A’ja Wilson and the Las Vegas Aces are looking to accomplish something only done once before by winning a third WNBA championship in four seasons. Standing in the way are the Phoenix Mercury, who are making their first championship appearance since 2021.The WNBA Finals will begin Friday in Las Vegas between the second-seed Aces and No. 4 seed Mercury. This year for the first time the two teams will play in a best-of-seven format as the league expanded its championship round from a five-game series.The Aces were pushed to the brink in both the opening round of the playoffs and…