It's been reduced to 99$ and it seems like it is a permanent reduction. I was thinking of buying it at 299$ because it had not been on sale for a while, so I'm very pleased this happened.
Their press release on it:
http://blog.23andme.com/news/one-million-strong-a-note-from-23andmes-anne-wojcicki/
Judging by your comment history, you're not a spammer. Please spend five minutes rewriting this so it doesn't look more like spam than like anything else. Indeed, I'm not sure this -isn't- spam, even considering its relevancy to the audience; it comes across as explicitly commercial.
I had a comment in that thread detailing the main benefit I saw with the service - seeing how your genetic variants effected drug metabolism.
This HN comment argues that most of the current value is novelty. The thread contains other bits of insight, including more hopeful ones.
Welp, AFAIK you can only click the "parent" hypertext at the top of the comment, which in this case requires four slow pageloads to access the OP.
I will therefore save you the pain.
So close! I clicked it twice and then decided to stop since I had no idea how many "parents" there would be before the top. Thanks for the link!
Others have already pointed to HN comments arguing that 23andme is mostly for novelty, but for those just skimming lw discussion that don't want to wade through pages of material, I'll highlight the strongest argument against taking 23andme seriously:
Recent research hints that 10% of ordinary healthy people have genes that we understand to be indicative of major disease. In other words, if these people bought 23andme's service, they would receive results that would be extraordinarily distressing, even while being nonetheless healthy.
See the study in question. Relevant quote: "[O]ur current best mean estimates of ∼400 damaging variants and ∼2 bona fide disease mutations per individual [is an underestimate]". (The study was brought to my attention by NPR. Note that I have not read the actual paper, but only listened to a news report on it and read the abstract.)
Would it be acceptable for me to make topics about ephemeral paperclip discounts?
Unless there are a bunch of lurking AIs I am unaware of, very few users care about paper clips.