skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How To Avoid Getting Kidnapped In China
From Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle:

To inspire himself, he lit up a marijuana cigarette,
excellent Land-O-Smiles brand.

Of course, this was in an alternative universe where the Axis powers won World War II...
The American cultural thing you're missing is that it's now considered gauche to brag about how you don't watch TV, even if it's true. For a while not owning a TV was fashionable; now there's a stereotype of "goody-two-shoes" people who go out of their way to avoid watching TV and brag about it repeatedly to anyone who will listen.
It isn't fair to compare people's reactions to a Segway/Segwell with their reactions to the Eunicycle, because the latter still hasn't worn off its novelty. People probably initially smiled when they saw the first Segways too. Given enough time and hype, people will insult you on the Eunicycle the same way.
News about pot legalization and stories like these seem to be hitting a feverish level lately. Are we on the verge of seeing some real changes on this front?
Kamen isn't the only one involved in FIRST, by far. It's a symptom of the personality that you would react like that.
Edit: The report is fine it's the reporting that's off.

Note: not large enough to be of any public health relevance

It's like overclocking a 4Ghz CPU by 0.01 Ghz. It's measurably faster, but not noticeably faster in normal use. So you can say it's an insignificant change, but you can't say they are the same speed. So "Organic has no health benefits" would not be a true statement without significant qualifiers.
Might I point out that alcohol tends to cause destructive updates to data?
Is you real or is you fake?
"It is like BMW switching to Toyota engines and putting a little sticker on the dashboard that says Powered by Lexus. How long will BMW last when that happens?" Could not have said it better.
How to render the Segway Human Transporter obsolete
+1 I am also a big fan of FIRST.
Great to see Apture and Kiw.is coming together. Huge fan of both products.
What the fuck is wrong with clapping?
The mall cops on segways with the helmets literally make me chuckle every time I see them. I feel they are only able to stop crimes by making thieves laugh endlessly.
I thought Toyota was pretty good until I followed the link in the article to Big Dog. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww
Big Dog is truly awesome. It runs, jumps, recovers from slips, climbs over rubble, ...
Decrim > Legal

Somethings are better to remain/become a cottage industry.

This is one. While these prototypes would fit what I imagine the packaging a cottage industry cannabis operation would produce, if there were the impetus to move the product out of its current packaging, I shudder to think what the marketers for the likes of mass-produced/consumed beers would come up with.

Also, I imagine the cognitive dissonance of the anti-drug commercials, like the one with pot smokers hitting the child on a bike while pulling away from a drive-thru window contrasted with commercials touting the virtues and benefits of legal pot would be too much for some to handle.

So for these reasons, and others -

Decrim > Legal
tongue in cheek but sublime:

http://www.metafilter.com/72961/Harshing-your-mellow#2168021
I wouldn't know, but I thought it was ironic that people in cars are yelling at Segway riders for being too lazy to walk. Pot, kettle.
Building out the Smart Grid of the Future
Food allergies get curiouser and curiouser
Perhaps. He's not the only person involved with FIRST (probably not even the most important), and my praise has more to do with the actual event than the person. Honestly, when it comes down to it, I could care less about someone's personality. It's more about their actual achievements (of which he's had both hits and misses).
There ought to be a word for when a proposed solution has suggestions on how to fix everything but the actual hard part. And then handwaves the actual hard part away.
Some food is grown for visual appeal as well as more realistic goals as increased shelf life or disease resistance. The huge beautiful, yet almost flavorless Golden Delicious being a classic example.
Flex 3 versus Silverlight 3 in Enterprise development.
Tales from Orange County's Taco Trucks
I wonder what would Segway's market be like if they could make a 20mph version that was safe to drive on city streets.
I agree on the infrastructure part. Still it does seem like we're moving in the direction they've envisioned. Some European countries are now closing some streets to car traffic and NYC recently closed sections around Times Square. The car culture is changing but it's going to take a while.

Even then though, I don't think the Segway will ever succeed in that market as currently designed. It is dorky. Problem is, I don't know what an alternative should look like. It feels like I'll know it when I see it.
Hunting for a name to better capture this essence, I settled on: Mopodium. Mopode for short.
The expansion of the universe is causing things which are not gravitationally (or stronger) bound to get further apart. So, your later scenario is closer to true, except that some galaxies are gravitationally bound to each other. For example, Andromeda is bound to our Milky Way and will get closer for the next 2½ billion years — resulting in a collision.

The AstronomyCast podcast (http://www.astronomycast.com/) has a fairly good explanation of the expansion of the universe in several episodes. Don't recall which episode, but I'd try ep. 5 and 6 (on the Big Bang) or 11 (Dark Energy). Actually, I'd recommend the whole show.
may be true, but if you are so sensitive that you care if someone thinks you are a dork for riding a segway then you deserve to walk.
FTA: Each commercial application is the dead end of the tree of evolution of that code, for nobody else can take it further.

Stated simply and elegantly.
Amazing what an Industrial Military Complex can do with half the US Budget. I'd like to see them put some money into space myself but robots are good too.
I think the current version would easily pass that test. I went to the Best Buy store in Palo Alto where you can demo one for free. The guy there told me that after hours they race it around the store and parking lot, etc. Customer demos are limited to "turtle mode" but it was still incredibly fun to ride.

I could see teenagers mocking it if they could't afford one (which most could not) but there is no doubt it's one of the most fun things I've ever ridden -- probably even more fun than skateboarding.
For the price of a segway you can get a motorcycle or a scooter or a moped or an electric bike, and drive it on city streets. Yet most Americans still drive cars. What benefits does a turbocharged Segway offer that these other options don't?
With empirical observations it takes mountains of evidence to prove your case and just one piece of evidence to disprove it.
And imagine what your encyclopedia would look like if you let anyone in the world put anything they wanted in it at any time! ;)

I'm trying and failing to come up with new ways to apply Wikipedia principles to address "real-world" problems...
The interesting thing was it was done in Colombia. If you read the job ad it pays 30,000,000 Colombian pesos, which equals ~$15,000 (or $5k/month per developer).

Which is pretty damn cheap for a 40/hr week developer, nevermind 80.

So it's even smarter than at first appears.

edit: Colombia.
dorkiness( helmet + segway ) == factorial( dorkiness( segway ) );
Make the 3 laws mandatory now!
Probably a combination of that and three other important things:

a) compromise on things like this in order to gain bigger freedoms, namely, the App Store - carriers are usually getting a cut, but not in this case

b) poor consumer protection in the US - carrier unlocking is, at least in some countries, required by law

c) (related to above) young, immature mobile market in the US
> But a trio of specialists from the United States and the Netherlands have put the question to rigorous tests.

This trio clearly did not take Physics 101 at their specialist training location. What you described is a conventional explanation for the arm swinging as I heard it back in high-school over 20 years ago.
Fashion is a multi billion dollar industry--people care greatly about how they look. You may not, but you are the outlier.
Nokia 5730 Xpressmusic Red Unlocked
Nokia 5730 XpressMusic red handset brings people's music to life with features that give music lovers easy access to the music they love. mobile phone and the Personal Computer, Nokia is changing the way music is enjoyed. It's 5 Mega pixel camera.
Popular opinion is accelerating in favor of legalization. See this chart from fivethirtyeight: http://is.gd/1TbjZ
When I look at the other suggestions there seems to be this idea that your Mom and Dad are suddenly going to start smoking pot if it's legal. I doubt that. So the ideas that mimic Coke or Beer branding don't do much for me.

If it were me I'd target the younger audience and use humor. Shoot for the energy drink audience who've gotten themselves so hyped up that they probably need it. Maybe use some of the footage from those old 50s films where everyone ends up dead at the end from pot use. Then follow it with a tag line like "Marijuana...It's not just for crazy people who jump out of windows anymore!"

I admit, I do love the back of the box in the article. There's some real mileage to be gotten out of "Alcohol is way more dangerous". But I can't see using that in the initial marketing since any decision to legalize would be preceded by a long debate that would certainly put those points in the public concious.
Mmm, I think rental/mall cops are plenty dorky. They don't have guns, or for that matter any other tools to subdue perps, do they? That makes them pretty harmless in my eyes.

Have you seen the Segway tours? http://bit.ly/4J4yJ

Throw some dubs or spinnas on those bad boys, and they'd still look like dorks.

edit- But I do agree with your list. Horses > motorcycles, for sure.
My college friend worked on an electric skateboard that looked cool like that:

http://frankschmitt.org/projects/powerboard

It has strain gauges that let you control it by shifting your weight. Looks cool yet there is no visible effort so it's a little surprising.
The counter-point to that is to recognize the fact that Google has had only three real innovations that worked over the course of its entire existence and it has been been almost five years since their last hit. All of the big players seem to be throwing darts at the innovation wall and taking long lingering looks around the room to see whose ideas they can copy. This is nothing new, but please don't suggest that Microsoft is the only company stuck in this position.
Coming from a product that can get you arrested as well as a history of highly variable cost and unknown quality and source, I would push safety, quality and consistency as main selling points.

"Our marijuana is grown in the rolling hills of Upstate New York - a region which has a long history of quality agriculture. We guarantee that our pot, containing 3.5% THC by weight, will give you a smooth and pleasant high that is a hallmark of Femur brand marijuana."
I agree with you, but imho Yahoo should have made these decisions years ago. Yahoo has clearly made a lot of bets it hasn't been able to follow through on (acquisition bets alone tell a sorry tale: Broadcast, Geocities, Inktomi, Overture).

When I was at Yahoo during the "dot bomb" crash. Yahoo was scrambling to decrease its reliance on advertising and made a big push into premium/paid subscriptions. Well that fizzled. As did Terry Semel's entertainment strategy and the subsequent attempt to go toe-to-toe with GOOG.

Personally, I like the entertainment/media portal strategy (out of the remaining options available). But at this point it still feels like Yahoo is being pushed into this strategy rather than boldy pushing forward with it. I think that's partially why it feals more like defeat/retreat at this point than anything else. Present-day Yahoo just can't shake that feeling of failure/lost opportunity in the eyes of many observers. That's gonna hound them for a long time until they can garner up a bona fide hit.
There was a novel about this 30+ years ago. _Acapulco Gold_, maybe?
Losers! Bring it On!
I don't think any of these things are a big deal. Real people don't religiously follow the 37signals blog and shun any company that ignores their principles.

Did my friend recommend this? Does the site save me money? Great, I don't care that there are 7 steps instead of 4.
Watch This Video. Do The Complete Opposite of Whatever It Says.
But thinking of Software engineering as a "applied degree" is downgrading what Software Engineering could be.

It is largely a point of view, but I would respectfully disagree. I suspect most people would think of an MD as an "applied degree" (or applied doctorate as the case may be), but many MD's engage in research and innovation. The same is true of the engineering degrees.
c'mon, what are the chances someone is gonna create a fake calcanis account on HN?
Thanks! Apture is actually really powerful and adds a lot to content (even automatically). I played with it at http://www.apture.com/create/ before implementing it into Kiwis.
Presumably the poster's faith in naturalism was too strong to be questioned by a few brain-hiccups.
Kaminsky, Mitnick pwned on Black Hat eve
I hope that one day MLM/ network marketing is made illegal.

My two favorite quotes:

"What if you could multi-level Google?"

"We proceeded to file patents to protect the idea!"
Why should we expect pot to be packaged, branded, or distributed any differently than cigarettes or beer? The truth lies somewhere between those two, with a few tweaks.

I'd expect pre-rolled joints to be kept in small packages with large warning labels and sold from behind the counter, exactly like cigarettes. "Loose" pot would likely be sold the same way. Habitual smokers would just walk up and ask for their brand.

Like beer, there would be "grow-houses" analogous to breweries. You could go take a tour, order some <strike>bar food</strike> munchies, and your favorite designer strand. Casual, or "sophisticated" smokers would endlessly debate the various aspects of the high and experience.

I think the more important question, and the unique part, is what to do about the paraphernalia? I don't foresee Walmart carrying bongs anytime soon. There would likely be more head shops springing up, with few big, existing players opting to go for that market for image reasons. This may change over a longer period of time.
The campus police at my university use exactly that: basically a Segway with a third wheel on the back.
The i2 model can fit through a doorway. It can be picked up and moved by a reasonably fit person. It can be used indoors or out, and with some accessories can carry a small amount of cargo.

The general public bias against Segways is kind of understandable. Most people aren't capable of thinking outside the box. I'm always a little surprised when the hacker/entrepreneur community seems to jump on that bandwagon though. Even moreso today when so many people claim to be "green" advocates and will proclaim that we need to explore other modes of transportation, yet bash anything that doesn't have 4 tires and a steering wheel.
Dunno. That's why I asked. Pretty high?
Actually, the two biggest benefits of GMOs should lead to their support by environmentalists; the fact that most environmentalists oppose GMOs, without knowing anything about the science in my experience, show their opposition is religious rather than rational. The two benefits are 1) because of their higher yields, less land need be cultivated, letting much go "back to nature", and 2) GMOs mostly need less cultivation, which means less fuels for tractors and less transportation for fertilizers, and less requirements for many pesticides.
It's an interesting idea. I need an echo chamber, er, like-minded group to prevent me from going crazy working with these imperative biologists.
I think it's the mall as context. Is a security guard at a dark warehouse dorky? They're not especially cool, but I don't get negative thoughts.

That Segway tour pic is pretty funny. It may be the helmets and manpurses, but funny still the same.
The problem that I can see with this document is that there's no clear indication of when this document was first made available to the public.

I get that the lectures were published in '02, but what's at issue is when this particular page was published. As far as I can tell, the only thing that dates this document particularly is the lastBuildDate in '06.
Can you take a Segway into a pubic building?
GitHub Recommended Repos Contest
If you could flip a switch and the segway could go operate in the 10-70mph range, and flip it back to operate in the 0-10mph range, you could transition from street to sidewalk (vehicle to pedestrian.)

This would be worth the extra money and not be uncool.
Oh it gets even better! He claimed that the software was crap! 1.7 Million dollars of crap to be exact!
HyperCard: What Could Have Been.
Both are impressive - I can imagine that a bipedal robot is a harder problem than a quadruped.
I think people are yelling insults because they know a Segway is a really expensive toy and they are jealous they can't blow that amount of money on something so frivolous.
The language doesn't really matter. Here are the problems that C introduces, and how other languages have solved them:

Buffer overflows. The solution is to not let the programmer (or attacker, when exploited) touch arbitrary memory. All the "managed" environments do this. ("But what if there's a bug in the implementation!?" Well, fix that, and you've fixed all existing software and all future software. Much better than checking every program for the same bug, for The Rest Of Eternity.)

Integer overflows. The solution is a better type system. Instead of overflowing, switch from the machine integer to a bigger integral type. (Yup, you lose performance after the switchover, but that's better than letting an attacker take over your machine. Optimize for speed after your program works correctly.)

Ignoring errors. Many C programmers forget to check for errors, and then the program state is silently corrupted, leading to security problems, strange behavior, etc. Exceptions solve this problem.

There are many other security problems, but these still keep cropping up even though we have tools that eliminate them. So they are most annoying to me. (Everyone has written "allow_login if !$password->valid", and I doubt new programming languages will fix that. But there is no excuse for buffer or integer overflows these days.)

Writing application software in C is the classic example of premature optimization and the evil it brings.
Make sure you take out insurance for collateral damage stemming from the drunken Haskell v. Erlang brawl that is sure to ensue.
I interpreted it first to mean functional programming, then remembered what functional means to most people, then remembered that this was HackerNews, so I had to check.
That's all perfectly true until something wipes out your monoculture, then it is a bit of a problem.

Too many eggs in a single basket is always a dangerous strategy, it will work perfectly for a long time and then one day you lose all your eggs. That's only a matter of time.
On Goldman Sachs Culture
That looks good, but with that gait it's clearly going to have problems with uneven surfaces. It needs to lift its feet more.
No, I grow both organic and non organic vegetables, so I actually know what I'm talking about.

How about you? ;)
Mapping Tomato Late Blight Fungus - How to make this page better?
How much is Twitter worth? $589 million, says SharesPost report
"Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?" - in downtown Mountain View? Wow.

The park next to where I live (next door Sunnyvale) occasionally has Segway Polo matches. I wonder what folks will say to that.
Where is Jon Lech Johansen, aka DVD John? Of DeCSS fame (for playing your purchased DVD in Linux), PyMusique (iTunes purchased music without DRM).

And don't forget this ad about doubleTwist:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/05/apple-gets-pwned-sf-sto...
Ouch. looks like they rm -rf /* mitnick's box. I'd like to know how they got in. I see some logs of phpmyadmin directory traversal attempts so maybe that and a weak system password?
Bah. I come to Hacker News to get away from the freetards on Slashdot. You're making this difficult for me :-)
That's very cool. Does it use vision or just tactile feeling of where it puts its feed down?
Yeah, because people in countries where pot is illegal never smoke it...
A bicycle can fit through a doorway, be picked up and moved, and carry a quite large amount of cargo. For the price of a Segway it could be equipped with a motor of similar speed and efficiency, or it can be run on human power. Unlike the Segway, the bicycle can go in the street and on dirt trails, has much greater maximum speed and range, and is cheap and easy to repair.

Sure, the Segway has advantages too - but when people suggest that it should go at 25mph in city streets, it's worth considering whether the Segway's unique properties actually contribute anything. Different tools are better for different jobs.

I'm all in favor of thinking outside the box, but things like cargo bicycles are more practical and interesting (though less sexy and high-tech) for my own city transportation needs: http://www.xtracycle.com/cargo-utility-bicycles.html
You are a fanboy.
It is common practice to take collections into your own hands in China. I have found it is not common for people to hold you hostage when you do not owe them money. Rule of thumb: pay your debts, don't screw over your creditors.
This year I lost every single one of my potatoes to scab. Imagine I planted those just after a civil war in central Africa. I need as much food - now, as I can get, right? Potato scab could seriously fuck me up. Therefore GMO potatoes sure seem like a great idea to me - if they're immune to scab.

Before 'monocrops' were engineered, nations went to war over food because it was scarce. Disease killed entire crops. Since Borlaug bred disease resistant rice and wheat - war is down. Way down. We make enough food.

Except - to keep up with growing populations, we have to use GMO technology to increase our agricultural output. Organic food is a first world nice to have. GMO food is a whole world MUST have.

Here's two facts that may change your attitude - or at least make you question what you think you know.

1) The father of the monocrop, Norman Borlaug won the Nobel prize for saving a billion lives by increasing agricultural output enormously... and yet most people have never heard of him. Bizarre, isn't it?

2) During the famine and widespread starvation in Africa in the 80s, Greenpeace successfully opposed the export of 'chemical' fertilizers from Europe to Africa. They were banned. Bizarre, isn't it?

The GMO fears are luddite. There is widespread misinformation. The FDA is incredibly strict here.
Colombia, South America is quite different to Columbia

(sorry, just nitpicking a little ... :)
Github Recommendation Contest
The 2009 GitHub Contest
Nothing against folks outside the U.S. that want to work here. But, I have not seen any real evidence that supports a skill set shortage. Can someone provide real numbers?
You guys are totally missing the best part!

The robot is named "Asimo".

[Eric Cartman voice]
"You can trust Awesom-o. In fact, you should tell Awesom-o all your most personal secrets. Awesom-o will not make fun of you or tell your secrets to other people and stuff."
Does twitter's 140 character limit improve writing or reading?
That's why I wrote

"There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them."

instead of

"The reason is that people don't want to be seen riding them."