mdek

This reminds me of a very old video game "Science Sleuths"[1] I ran into as a kid, where you had to identify a blob on the beach.

[1] http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/Sleuths.html

I agree. Give me a short, concise, unapologetic error message.

Some years ago, the Google Voice app for Android would put a message in the notification bar whenever there was even the most brief connectivity issue (which in the early days of 3G on android was frequent) starting off with "We have a problem ... <connnecting to your google voice account or something>". Considering that I used that GV number for two highly regulated activities with potential high liability, my heart would skip a beat every time a pull out my phone and see "We have a problem".

> NMS claims CLIA certification. This is the older law where labs self-certify compliance. Congress left CLIA in place alongside FDA IVD regulations to protect small pharmacists, but obviously Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp run fleets through that loophole, and most labwork is CLIA-certified, not FDA-approved.

This is highly misleading. CLIA and the associated federal regulations are the standard to which diagnostic clinical laboratories are held, not an "older" or "loophole" regulation. All laboratories in the US that provide patient results for clinical use are regulated by CLIA. There are FDA-approved test systems and "Lab-developed tests" (LDTs) that are BOTH subject to CLIA obligations, which are unbelievably complex (and in my opinion are a source of regulatory capture in laboratory medicine, but that's not directly relevant). Most high complexity lab tests are LDTs.

FDA-approved tests go through a formal FDA process such that the performing lab only has to "verify" the performance characteristics prior to patient testing. An LDT requires a much more stringent lab-level validation plan prior to patient testing. Both requiring strict ongoing quality control and quality assurance. And while the validation plan for an LDT can be self-designed, there are still strict requirements for what it most contain.

Compliance is NOT "self-certified," instead there are routine, extremely intensive compliance inspections (scheduled and unscheduled), either by a regional CLIA office, or by an organization accredited by CMS to provide such verification of compliance (such as CAP or COLA). These are not cursory inspections but a deep dive into all lab operations and personnel, equipment, maintenance and quality records, and other documentation.

I'm not a huge fan of Quest or Labcorp's presence in the field, and I don't know the specifics of NMS and this PFAS testing (CLIA compliance isn't required for research or non-clinical). If NMS has CLIA certification and they state the methodology and limitations of their LDT it's generally perfectly valid to provide the test, and the burden is generally on the downstream physician or provider to ensure the results are properly interpreted and applied.

HN thread yesterday about lead contamination of Turmeric in Bangladesh and the government's response to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481693

A music theory instructor from my past told us a story about his equivalent practical exam. He had to demonstrate proficiency with multiple string instruments. Instead of learning fingering for each instrument, he claimed he tuned them so they could all be played the same way. I don’t have any training in string instruments, so I’m not sure how feasible this actually is...

well, the government has definitely tried [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...

This is great, though with the usual formatting caveats of pdf printing from any browser! Firefox for Android used to have this feature up to version 60's somewhere but it was removed. I've found it useful on my android to keep an old version of firefox for limited use when I need things like pdf generation or various "unapproved" addons. Now that most of my extensions work on Firefox Nightly (with AMO), and with restored pdf functionality, there isn't much reason to keep the old version around. I'm very happy lately with firefox, both on desktop and android. I wish it would recover some market share from chrome.

FYI Ebay no longer owns Paypal, and hasn't for several years. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_PayPal

> September 2014 onward: It is announced that PayPal will be split off eBay. The split will be completed by the second quarter of 2015.

Per the article, Paypal is seizing the money as damages:

> It also said that the money was taken from her account "for its liquidated damages arising from those AUP violations pursuant to the User Agreement.

There was a HN discussion[0] on this back in 2020.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226513

From the article, it sounds like nothing even remotely questionable was done by the reporter who found the flaw:

> "According to the Post-Dispatch, one of its reporters discovered the flaw in a web application allowing the public to search teacher certifications and credentials. No private information was publicly visible, but teacher Social Security numbers were contained in HTML source code of the pages."

True. I did in fact have to explicitly downgrade TST to the <57-compatible version. The new version apparently doesn't yet support hiding the tab bar across the top of the browser.

If you want to try these performance improvements (servo, e10s) but keep legacy add-on compatibility (at least for now) I suggest installing firefox 56, disabling auto-updates, and making the following changes/additions in about:config

browser.tabs.remote.autostart true browser.tabs.remote.force-enable true layout.css.servo.enabled true

This way I get to keep my Tree Style Tab, Lastpass, and a few other add-ons that haven't yet been ported to WebExtensions.

Convenient FTP link, since it seems right now the automated installers are jumping between versions 55 and 57: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/56.0b12/

Will this address the absurd automatic updates/reboot "feature"? I've had the experience multiple times where a step away for a few minutes and come back to a blank desktop, even during the "active hours" period. This is especially infuriating when I do most of my work in a vbox slackware VM and win10 is just a host that I want to stay out of the way; instead I lose my entire current state. This seems like a major defect for either a "Pro" or "Pro for Workstations" version

Has anyone found a reliable way to disable automatic reboots for Windows 10 Pro? My registry mods have all eventually stopped working.