schmatz

There Is No Antimemetics Division is such a creative, page-turning, terrifying read and I'm glad it's getting the author some recognition from the big publishers. It's one of those books that keeps returning to my thoughts every so often and I can't wait to see the improved version next year!

I like the term “Incident report”.

I would highly recommend avoiding Dante Labs. I had a terrible experience with them. There were extreme delays, lasting many months. When I requested the full genome be sent to me, they insisted the only way to do it was a hard drive. This hard drive was sent from Italy to California. On its way, it was seized by customs in Mumbai, who opened it and re-sealed it. The package arrived in tatters, and based on my analysis of the genome with the appropriate reference, it appeared to be someone else's genome. Many of the SNPs disagreed with a later 23andme report I got, which I assume is more accurate.

I was stupid enough to sign up for their SmartGut program. They never clearly disclose how much the test costs if you opt to use your insurance. They’re $2700. Not only that, they make it seem like you purchased 6 tests, but the $2700 charge is per test. Their billing practices are questionable, at least from the perspective of the consumer. On the BBB page for uBiome tons of people are complaining. While I can afford the surprise charge, I feel bad for the many that surely cannot.

Cool stuff. I wonder if we'll see Blockchain technology spread to other commodities. The value prop mentioned is transparency - I wonder how much this will improve with this solution, how much of an issue it was before, and whether increased transparency will cause any issues itself.

BTW, I wonder if this is the oldest organization investing in blockchain technology.

It's a great design! I use a similar setup for my blog and wrote about it here: http://blog.michaelschmatz.com/2016/03/31/how-i-wrote-this-b...

I had a chance to meet Tom Wheeler to discuss net neutrality in the summer of 2014. It was coming off of a bad press cycle for him (John Oliver calling him a dingo), so I didn't know what to expect.

He was extremely reasonable and very receptive to the needs of the tech community and small businesses. I came away from the meeting pleasantly surprised and have been happy with his actions during his tenure. Sad to see him go.

I think this would probably be the best choice after templating the filter

Great suggestion, thanks! I've updated the article accordingly :)

RAM is 1600MHz DDR3. I do have an SSD, but as the memory usage of the program was ~32MB, so I doubt it would have an effect haha

Intel Core i7-4980HQ

I updated the blog post with your suggestion; CDN should be updated soon :)

Great suggestion; I wasn't sure the idiomatic way to template this, thanks for letting me know!

I think what you said about mathematics applies for the rest of science in general - it's more and more of a group effort. That being said, I think there is ample room for innovation in emerging areas like biohacking.

There is also something to be said for analyzing all of the new datasets coming online and trying to gather new insights (this is also the least capital-intensive option!)

The main reason that I like this setup over other solutions is that it's very similar to the way I write code; having one workflow makes things a bit easier!

Is there a particular workflow that you use?

This is a good idea for a blog post! The way we have set up the system ensures that we requeue upon failure and concurrent updates are not an issue.

We are eagerly waiting for Lambda VPC support!

I'm happy you're interested in this sort of stuff; shoot me an email, let's chat :) [email protected]

We have a worker consuming S3 events and updating the index. On a related note, we have experimented with Lambda to do something similar; AWS has done a fantastic job integrating their products :)

Sure! We batch together data to load into warehouses by time and a few other properties. Usually, to figure out what objects are in S3, you have to issue an S3 list objects command. That operation tends to be relatively slow, especially if there are many objects.

Instead, when we put a new object, we update a table in Aurora which tracks all of the relevant objects. That way, we can query information like "what objects were uploaded in a certain time range" very quickly.