TLDR 2018-11-28

Amazon had its biggest sales day ever on Monday. While it didn't give specific sales numbers, it did mention that the Echo Dot was the top selling item and millions of Echo devices were sold. Over the Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, customers ordered over 180 million items, and sales from small and medium businesses grew 20% over last year.

Youtube's new original shows will be freely available in an ad-supported format. Its current original shows like "Cobra Kai" and "Step Up: High Water" will remain behind the Youtube Premium paywall for now, but will be moved to an ad-supported model by 2020. Youtube Premium is Youtube's Netflix competitor that costs $12/month, I'm editorializing here this isn't in the article, my sense from reading this is that the subscription service isn't doing well so they're pivoting to just making everything free and ad-supported.

Firecracker is a virtualization technology designed for serverless deployments that's been open sourced by AWS. The purpose is to create super lightweight virtual machines (microVMs), to decrease memory footprint and startup times, it's currently being used in AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. Not sure why AWS open sourced this since it seems like it'd be a pretty big competitive advantage but I'm glad they did!

Police in the UK want to pool multiple data sets from a number of police forces for crime prediction. They want to be able to predict who is at risk of being a perpetrator or victim of violent crime. They won't use this information to pre-emptively arrest people, but rather to provide support from local health or social workers. A prototype of the National Data Analytics Solution is expected by March 2019 and is being designed to be used eventually by every police department in the UK.

Do you ever launch your satellite and realize that you forgot to set up a ground station to process the data stream? Well you're in luck, AWS has launched Ground Station, a Ground-Station-as-a-Service that allows you to spin up a satellite ground station as easily as you would a virtual machine. So you could get one up and running for a specific event like severe weather, a natural disaster, or a sporting event, or you could rent one long-term. As satellites get cheaper (there are really small satellites now like CubeSats, PocketQubes, and SunCubes), this service could be nifty to get data down from your satellites and into S3, Redshift, or any other AWS service.

Founder Rewind is a list of videos of famous founders and entrepreneurs from their "early days". Really interesting to see, I gotta say little Bill Gates is adorable.

Scientists did a big study with 20,000 people with ADHD and a control group of 35,000 without ADHD. They identified 304 points with statistically significant differences in DNA between the two groups, grouped into 12 important regions. There seems to be a correlation between genetic risk for ADHD and other conditions like depression and anorexia. Some of the genes identified also affect other neurological conditions, like speech and learning disabilities, depression, and schizophrenia.