hn thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519952

Enables changing the content of a page

Opens the Hacker News discussion page for the website, if one exists. Otherwise offers to submit the site to HN.

Color suggestions for cartography

Explanation: The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts. Pictured above is one of several striking dust pillars of the Eagle Nebula that might be described as a gigantic alien fairy. This fairy, however, is ten light years tall and spews radiation much hotter than common fire. The greater Eagle Nebula, M16, is actually a giant evaporating shell of gas and dust inside of which is a growing cavity filled with a spectacular stellar nursery currently forming an open cluster of stars. The above image in scientifically re-assigned colors was released in 2005 as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Researchers confirmed these points at a press conference today at NASA headquarters where they announced the long-awaited results of Gravity Probe B (GP-B).

What came to be known as the "Third Wave" began at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto as a game without any direct reference to Nazi Germany, says Ron Jones, who had just begun his first teaching job in the 1966-67 academic year. When a social studies student asked about the German public's responsibility for the rise of the Third Reich, Jones decided to try and simulate what happened in Germany by having his students "basically follow instructions" for a day.

NASA's Space Shuttle program continues to wind down, with only two more launches planned -- the final one taking place in June (if funded). NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently announced four facilities where shuttle orbiters will be displayed permanently in New York, California, Florida, and Washington, D.C. At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Launch Pad 39B, originally designed for the Apollo program and later customized to support the Space Shuttle, is currently being taken apart in preparation for future missions with new, post-shuttle launch systems. Space Shuttle Discovery -- which landed for the final time last month after having flown 39 missions, traveling 148,221,675 miles -- now sits inside Orbiter Processing Facility-2, as it's inspected, disassembled, and prepared for its new life as a public exhibit. Collected here are some images of the 29-year old program's last days

Okay, so you're a CS graduate and you did a hardware/assembly course as part of your degree, but perhaps that was a few years ago now and you haven't really kept up with the details of processor designs since then.

In particular, you might not be aware of some key topics that developed rapidly in recent times...

pipelining (superscalar, OoO, VLIW, branch prediction, predication)
multi-core & simultaneous multithreading (SMT, hyper-threading)
SIMD vector instructions (MMX/SSE/AVX, AltiVec)
caches and the memory hierarchy
Fear not! This article will get you up to speed fast. In no time you'll be discussing the finer points of in-order vs out-of-order, hyper-threading, multi-core and cache organization like a pro.

In the 1980s the Department of Energy started to design what would have been the biggest science experiment in the world, the Superconducting Super Collider. Waxahachie, Texas was all set to host a particle accelerator that would have dwarfed Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider, today's reigning champ. Construction began in 1991, then was abruptly canceled in 1993. During a lull in this year’s March Meeting in Dallas, we set off to explore the dilapidated facility. Here’s what we found…

Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd spent one week around Kirkenes and the Norway-Russia border, in -25 Celsius temperature, to make this magnificent time-lapse video of the Aurora Borealis.

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the
probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The
estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher
figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from
management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of
agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a
Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could
properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the
machinery?"

Quality guidance for software systems

We blame teen turmoil on immature brains. But did the brains cause the turmoil, or did the turmoil shape the brains?

The latest addition to the long list of chemicals that I never hope to encounter takes us back to the wonderful world of fluorine chemistry. I'm always struck by how much work has taken place in that field, how long ago some of it was first done, and how many violently hideous compounds have been carefully studied.

Computer

Lt. Col. Gabriel Green and Capt. Zachary Bartoe patrol the airspace in an F-15E Strike Eagle as the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches May 14, 2010, at Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

Quotes from many sources. A particularly good source of quotes on this theme is: The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky (Pantheon Books, 1984).
This started out as a list of negative and pessimistic comments about new ideas, but, to provide some balance, I've begun to add a few overly enthusiastic and optimistic comments.

R. STANLEY WILLIAMS, a senior fellow at Hewlett-Packard Labs, wrote this month’s cover story, ”How We Found the Missing Memristor.” Earlier this year, he and his colleagues shook up the electrical engineering community by introducing a fourth fundamental circuit design element. The existence of this element, the memristor, was first predicted in 1971 by IEEE Fellow Leon Chua, of the University of California, Berkeley, but it took Williams 12 years to build an actual device.

DARPA's new memristor-based approach to AI consists of a chip that mimics how neurons process information

This article explains why Singleton isn’t thread safe, how DCLP attempts to address that problem, why DCLP may fail on both uni- and multiprocessor architectures, and why you can’t (portably) do anything about it. Along the way, it clarifies the relationships among statement ordering in source code, sequence points, compiler and hardware optimizations, and the actual order of statement execution. Finally, it concludes with some suggestions regarding how to add thread-safety to Singleton (and similar constructs) such that the resulting code is both reliable and efficient.

Location: Main Shelves 3rd Floor
Call Number: QA76.76.D47 M39 1993
Number of Items: 1
Status: On Shelf

"Earth From Above" is the result of the aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand's five-year airborne odyssey across six continents. It's a spectacular presentation of large scale photographs of astonishing natural landscapes. Every stunning aerial photograph tells a story about our changing planet.

The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.

By Neal Stephenson

Jeff Yang muses on how Apple managed to beat the tech titans of Japan by playing their game, only better

The NANOG mailing list is established to provide a forum for the exchange of technical information and the discussion of specific implementation issues that require cooperation among network service providers.
Appropriate topics include routing, broad-based engineering problems/issues/solutions, outages, performance measurement, evolving wide-area technologies, exchange points, traffic engineering, operational experience, ISP security, and trouble ticket systems.

There are times when submodules are not adequate for the task at hand. For example, blending multiple repos together into one single repo while still maintaining the history of each repo. To do this, the subtree merge strategy is a better solution.

How IFR/VFR/Marginal VFR is determined

In a comprehensive study commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), NEXTOR researchers analyzed data from 2007 to calculate the economic impact of flight delays on airlines and passengers, the cost of lost demand, and the collective impact of these costs on the U.S. economy. The study authors found that increased delays directly correlate with increased costs.