Specifically, the NY law applies to businesses with 4 or more employees (including owners/founders).

It seems to me that this is a bridge between Redshift/S3, so you can join data from both sources. I believe Athena is S3 only

While I never got a call regarding my app, after hearing about app rejections for no reason and waiting 1 month to get a response I was nervous after my first submission. It only took 5 days to get approved, maybe I just got lucky, or maybe the approval process isn't as bad as it is made out to be.

At first glance, yes, unless there is a longer word in there

So by the nature of the app, the string I am checking will often increase by 1 letter, and then I check the string again. Right now I save a list of strings I have checked, because it is quicker to see if a string in in that small list than in the dictionary, then once I find a word I clear the list of strings I have checked. Is there any thing else like this I could do to speed things up so I am not constantly checking if the same strings are a word? Should I not be clearing that list so often?

There's always http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho-Corasick_algorithm

Everything has been done before :)