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For Runner With M.S., No Pain While Racing, No Feeling at the Finish

Despite a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis three years ago, Kayla Montgomery, 18, has gone on to become one of the fastest young distance runners in the country.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

“I make myself do it,” she said.

“I tell myself, ‘I know you’re tired and you can’t feel anything and it’s hard but you’re going to finish this.’ And then I do.”

Posted on 2014-03-04T23:24:01+0000

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Mandatory vacations in tech: better code, happier companies - The Sourcegraph Blog

Can a policy that banks use to combat insider fraud also make tech companies produce better products and happier employees? Sure. At Sourcegraph, our mandatory vacation policy requires everyone to completely disconnect from work for at least 2 weeks each year—no exceptions. We’ve instituted this pol...

Click to view the original at sourcegraph.com

Hasnain says:

"Can a policy that banks use to combat insider fraud also make tech companies produce better products and happier employees? Sure. "

Posted on 2014-03-04T23:22:36+0000

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The sanitary pad revolutionary

Arunachalam Muruganantham has helped bring cheap sanitary pads to rural India, by inventing a simple machine to make them - but it nearly cost him his marriage.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

Hasnain says:

"He was once asked whether receiving the award from the Indian president was the happiest moment of his life. He said no - his proudest moment came after he installed a machine in a remote village in Uttarakhand, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where for many generations nobody had earned enough to allow children to go to school.

A year later, he received a call from a woman in the village to say that her daughter had started school. "Where Nehru failed," he says, "one machine succeeded.""

This guy is inspiring.

Posted on 2014-03-04T18:12:42+0000

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Downloading Software Safely Is Nearly Impossible

Let’s say you have a brand-new Windows laptop and you’re just oh, so happy. You’re pretty sure the NSA did not interdict it during shipment, and thus that it comes only with the flaky goatware Micr...

Click to view the original at noncombatant.org

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Dear Google, am I pregnant? - Charlie's Diary

Now it appears that PA Consulting staff uploaded the entire hoard to Google servers based outside the UK ?a process that took weeks, as the data came to them archived on 27 DVDs (making it on the order of 125Gb, after compression).

Click to view the original at antipope.org

Hasnain says:

"I'm asking because it now appears that management consultants PA Consulting acquired the hospital admission and treatment records of every NHS patient in England and Wales (all 47 million of them). This is almost certainly inappropriate, and comes at a point when the roll-out of the care.data national health statistics database is on hold for six months over concerns about who would be able to access it and whether the records could be de-anonymized. Now it appears that PA Consulting staff uploaded the entire hoard to Google servers based outside the UK—a process that took weeks, as the data came to them archived on 27 DVDs (making it on the order of 125Gb, after compression)."

Posted on 2014-03-03T18:26:30+0000

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Pycoder's Weekly - Top Python Projects of 2013

We are doing something a little different this week. This issue is a round of all the Top Python projects of 2013 as determined by you(your clicks in our 2013 issues). So take a look as there are plenty of great things to see here! Did we miss anything or do you have some suggestions for projects th...

Click to view the original at us4.campaign-archive1.com

Hasnain says:

I'm a bit late to the party, but this is a pretty cool list of projects/libraries/frameworks for anyone that develops in Python.

Posted on 2014-03-03T18:24:22+0000

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Dismantling Fukushima: The World's Toughest Demolition Project - IEEE Spectrum

Taking apart the shattered power station and its three melted nuclear cores will require advanced robotics

Click to view the original at spectrum.ieee.org

Hasnain says:

"A radiation-proof superhero could make sense of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in an afternoon. Our champion would pick through the rubble to reactor 1, slosh through the pooled water inside the building, lift the massive steel dome of the protective containment vessel, and peek into the pressure vessel that holds the nuclear fuel. A dive to the bottom would reveal the debris of the meltdown: a hardened blob of metals with fat strands of radioactive goop dripping through holes in the pressure vessel to the floor of the containment vessel below. Then, with a clear understanding of the situation, the superhero could figure out how to clean up this mess."

Posted on 2014-03-03T01:49:21+0000

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New partition function record: p(10^20) computed

The partition functionp(n) counts the number of partitions of n, i.e. the number of ways n can be written sum of positive integers when disregarding the order of the terms. For example, 4 has the five distinct partitions 4, 3+1, 2+2, 2+1+1, 1+1+1+1, so p(4) = 5. This week, I set a new record by comp...

Click to view the original at fredrikj.net