Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave • Hacker News Board

Re: Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

#41

Post by argumentum » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 5:28 PM UTC

buss wrote: post #40

argumentum wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt that you all are good engineers/scientists, and that whatever processes you seek to optimize, you will. But these things will happen anyway, whether at Counsyl or at another well-funded company with high-quality people. Whether Counsyl has happened upon some key insight or technology which will make it a revolutionary company is another question. I don't see enough in the article or amongst the comments…

> The points about Pinker etc are not that these aren't impressive people, but rather what do they have to do with the technology or business of Counsyl other than snob appeal? Ah, I see your concern. That's an understandable critique coming from outside of this industry. I had similar thoughts before I got more familiar with why we have the advisors that we do. Our industry (that is, genetic testing) is a minefield.…

Ok, points taken. I understand the optimism .. its usually a great thing, and I could be being overly paranoid. All the same TC is so 00's, just launch yourself on HN.

Regardless of my criticisms, I do hope that every startup working in good faith to change the world does so, so good luck!

Re: Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

#42

Post by geuis » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 6:25 PM UTC

zmitri wrote: post #29

geuis wrote: post #28

I had a lovely 2-3 month contract with Counsyl last year to help them build some internal systems. I have to say that they really have their stuff together and working with the team was a lot of fun. I've mostly had to stay silent the last year about what they're doing due to NDA and such, and won't say much here, but I HIGHLY recommend anyone looking to have kids consider going through Counsyl's program. Also, if yo…

Their recruitment is quite annoying. I never sent in anything and they sent me emails saying thanks for applying and to fill in a slot on the calendar for when I could meet. Their approach to the process immediately turned me off.

Perhaps I'm not understanding correctly. You didn't send a resume yet you were scheduled for an interview anyway? That doesn't make a terrible amount of sense.

Re: Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

#43

Post by doublescythe » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 6:30 PM UTC

argumentum wrote: post #36

Far be it for me to rain on this parade, as the founders seem great (and probably somehow related to me given their last name), but if I were to bet on a startup capitalizing on the moore's law change in genomics, it would not be this one (or any other existing company). Why? From what I can tell, Counsyl is doing genotyping as opposed to sequencing . The latter is what is undergoing "moore's law" price declines. Sec…

The second iteration of Counsyl's test is a sequencing test. It's already been launched. It was referenced in the article. Expect a third iteration to include additional diseases in the near future.

Re: Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

#44

Post by doublescythe » Wed, Apr 24, 2013, 6:34 PM UTC

rcthompson wrote: post #13

lvs wrote: post #9

What's revolutionary about 400 SNPs for $599? There's absolutely no chance to compete with that kind of product and pricing.

To pose the same question in another way: what does Counsyl give you for $599 that companies like 23andMe don't already give you for $99? I couldn't find anything on the counsyl website that addresses this. Edit: Actually, I think the difference might be that Counsyl is marketing to a clinical market, as opposed to 23andMe which is direct-to-consumer. Since I've read that 10x price overhead for clinical stuff is typi…

Counsyl's test is at most $99 if you do not have insurance. Most major insurance companies now cover the test, so you're usually just making a $20 co-pay. You're looking at the insurance billing rate - compare $599 to tens of thousands of dollars that Lab Corp or Quest charge to screen just a few diseases. Counsyl screens for over 150+.

Re: Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

#45

Post by pyre » Thu, Apr 25, 2013, 12:51 AM UTC

drakaal wrote: post #27

pyre wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the level of 'sharing.' If it's just statistics (e.g. 10% of people that use our service have discovered X disease), then I don't know how much of your privacy is pierced.

I do data mining. Ready here we go. 10% of people who used service discovered they have BrandonWirtz's Disease. Requirements: Male. Primarily Caucasion as primarily limited to Arian Descent. Symptoms onset at 55. Not symptomatic for those with BMI under 22. With this information I can take the 100% and cut the list to 50% that are male. 50% that are caucasion. (25%) Would have already know if they were over 55 so we…

Maybe I'm missing something. How does "10% of our customers have X disease" allow you to get down to a specific person?

  | With this information I can take the 100% and cut the list
  | to 50% that are male. 50% that are caucasion. (25%) Would
  | have already know if they were over 55 so we cut another
  | 25% Strip last names for ones that would not be of the right
  | heritage. Suddenly the eligible candidates are only 12% of
  | the total.

  | I know that 80% of those are the people on that
  | list.

What list? Are you somehow taking a list of names from outside and correlating them based just on 'X%'?

Re: Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

#46

Post by zmitri » Thu, Apr 25, 2013, 5:53 AM UTC

geuis wrote: post #42

zmitri wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their recruitment is quite annoying. I never sent in anything and they sent me emails saying thanks for applying and to fill in a slot on the calendar for when I could meet. Their approach to the process immediately turned me off.

Perhaps I'm not understanding correctly. You didn't send a resume yet you were scheduled for an interview anyway? That doesn't make a terrible amount of sense.

I suppose I can show the emails:

> Hi Dmitri, > > Thanks for applying to Counsyl back in August. At the time we didn't > have any openings in engineering but now we do. > > We'd like to schedule you for an initial phone interview with Rishi > Kacker, VP of Engineering, to learn more about your interests and how > you may fit in at Counsyl. > > Please book an appointment here: http://bit.ly/Rishi_appointments > > Enter in your full name in the "What" section and the best number to > reach you in the "Where" section of the appointment slot. > > Email me once you've finished booking your appointment so that I can > confirm that it went through.

I responded saying -- hey this is spamming me and is kind of disrespectful/underhanded approach to recruiting and they said:

Hi Dmitri,

This is definitely an error on our part. I'm sorry for the annoyance.

It looks like your name was pulled up as an exceptional candidate back in August (likely from a HackerNews thread). You should have only been contacted to check for interest, but unfortunately, you were sent a stock email (as if you had previously applied).

See the attached linkedin profile PDF from August.

I'm sorry again for this clerical error. I'll look further into the root cause and hopefully we can prevent this type of error in the future. I'd be happy to take a call if you have further concerns.

EDIT: On the linkedin profile they mentioned and sent via screen shot, it explicitly says no recruiters.

Re: Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

#47

Post by lightcatcher » Thu, Apr 25, 2013, 8:14 AM UTC

drakaal wrote: post #34

lightcatcher wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently taking a class in data privacy, which is about assessing privacy risks using a mathematically rigorous formalization (differential privacy, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy ) and developing algorithms to allow for minimal risk release of private databases and avoid attacks like yours above. Your post makes it seem like you might enjoy reading more about the field; you should check o…

Those formula's assume the creator knows all the variables. I have data on things like Probablity a First name is of which race. When names started to appear for determining maximum Age. Search data for identifying people who were worried they had a disease. Often a single piece of data will cause the intersection of two traits to be 80% accurate. You can't mathmatically predict these things because you don't know ho…

This is not true at all. Differential privacy works to counteract EXACTLY these types of attacks. There are some very basic proofs that the privacy guarantees of a differential private release mechanism is not at all weakened by external data, such as what you've listed. Differential privacy attempts to minimize the risk of being a row in a database given that the attacker knows the values of every other row (and has whatever external data he wants).

Re: Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave

#48

Post by drakaal » Thu, Apr 25, 2013, 4:54 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #45

drakaal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do data mining. Ready here we go. 10% of people who used service discovered they have BrandonWirtz's Disease. Requirements: Male. Primarily Caucasion as primarily limited to Arian Descent. Symptoms onset at 55. Not symptomatic for those with BMI under 22. With this information I can take the 100% and cut the list to 50% that are male. 50% that are caucasion. (25%) Would have already know if they were over 55 so we…

Maybe I'm missing something. How does "10% of our customers have X disease" allow you to get down to a specific person? | With this information I can take the 100% and cut the list | to 50% that are male. 50% that are caucasion. (25%) Would | have already know if they were over 55 so we cut another | 25% Strip last names for ones that would not be of the right | heritage. Suddenly the eligible candidates are only 12%…

Things like cookie inspection allow a data miner to get a list of known customers of a company. I can tell you every RackSpace Customer, Every Amazon Shopper, Every FaceBook User.

If you have seen those ads on FB that are for something you just searched on Amazon, or that want to sell you hosting for a place you already have hosting with you know what I mean.

If you have enough data about the factors that are common of people with a disease, and then compare that with percentage of people known to have that disease from a set.

If 10% of Company's American clients have Disease X, and Disease X requires you live in a cold climate to be diagnosed ( Raynaud's for example ) then you can exclude the people who live in a warm climate.

Now if you want to target people with Raynauds and you know 80% of the clients live in California,Texas, And Nevada. You know that 50% of the remaining clients have Raynaud's.

This is of course a contrived example, and uses much less data than would be used by a Data Miner.

For the people saying "no there are formula's we can prevent this from happening" yeah you know who made those formula's? The People who make money selling data. And thos formulas are to keep you from thinking it is dangerous.