Hacker NewsFriday, May 16

A thought-provoking story where machines create humans as an experiment called "EARTH," exploring the evolution of human civilization from the machines' perspective. As humans develop rapidly and approach creating AGI, the story culminates in a mysterious presentation titled "THEY ARE WATCHING."

A 9½-month-old baby named KJ Muldoon, born with a rare genetic disorder called CPS1 deficiency, became the first patient to receive a custom gene-editing treatment. Despite doctors initially suggesting comfort care due to the condition's severity, his parents chose to pursue treatment, leading to this groundbreaking medical intervention.

A consultant recounts installing an IT system for a family business after its owner's death, only to face resistance from a manager trying to sabotage the new controls. Despite backing up data and uncovering potential fraud, the owners ultimately chose not to pursue action, leading the consultant to decline further involvement.

Databricks announces acquisition of Neon, a serverless Postgres database company. Neon's innovative architecture and developer-first approach have made it popular among both developers and AI agents. The acquisition aims to disrupt the OLTP database market by focusing on modern development needs.

A study reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) perform worse in multi-turn conversations compared to single responses, with a 39% drop in performance across tasks. Once LLMs make incorrect assumptions early in conversations, they struggle to recover and maintain accuracy.

The article discusses the author's love-hate relationship with NumPy, a Python library for array computations. While praising its simplicity for basic operations, the author criticizes NumPy's complexity when handling multidimensional arrays and broadcasting operations. They argue that the software lacks intuitive methods for expressing complex array operations, often requiring convoluted code solutions that are difficult to read and understand.

A chip called SF32LB52J from SiFli has been selected for Core Time 2 smartwatch development. The chip features an open source SDK, low power consumption, and meets all requirements for building a modern smartwatch. The decision came after evaluating various options and considering factors like software compatibility and power efficiency.

In 2011, Larry Page became Google's CEO and implemented changes to address company inefficiencies, including a 50-minute meeting policy to allow breaks between meetings. While this became a default in Google Calendar, it wasn't widely followed, though one NYC team creatively used the spare 10-minute slots for their standups, sometimes confronting others who overran their allocated time.

A software developer shares their frustrating experience with a take-home coding assignment for Kagi Search, where despite providing a detailed proposal and delivering a comprehensive email client solution that met all requirements, they received an automated rejection with minimal feedback, highlighting the questionable nature of unpaid technical assessments in job interviews.

Coinbase reported a cybersecurity breach where overseas support agents were bribed to steal customer data for social engineering attacks. While no passwords or funds were compromised, the incident may cost up to $400M. The company refused a $20M ransom demand and is offering a reward for information leading to arrests.