Classic HCI Demos | Hacker News Reader

Classic HCI Demos

jackrusher.com

71 pointszdw17 comments

These are awesome and criminally under-viewed (on youtube). Here is one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLcfMEQjMqM

currently with a single-digit number of likes, that uses two people at a table, with a marker, and some pieces of foam-core? with clauses printed out, showing how unification works in Prolog. Nice.

The care, time, and effort that went into making this, when production tools were different than those available today, is really something to appreciate.

After watching the video, I feel amazed by the clarity of the explanation and the examples. I didn't know what prolog is (still don't really know), but at least this video made me think about pattern matching and backtracking in an interesting way.

I think Prolog is one of those languages everyone should spend a little time learning, just to stretch your programming brain in a new way.

It’s a logic programming language: very roughly, you program by stating the logical tests that are true when your task is finished. Program execution is the runtime trying to make that true; it’s kind of magical.

Some fascinating things.

The first one I happened to look at has the only hypercard entry. Someone made, in 1991, a user pattern recognition engine to automatically recognize and automate repetitive tasks in the GUI[0,1].

0: http://acypher.com/Publications/CHI91/EagerCHI.html

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6ZL4BXOfbk

If you are new to HCI, I recently wrote a blog post about applying HCI methods to your work. I also list some further reading at the end.

My HCI toolbox: Methods for designing and evaluating UIs https://austinhenley.com/blog/myhcitoolbox.html

What does HCI stand for? Human Computer Interaction?

Correct.

Or Human Computer Interface

I think there's so much innovation ahead with HCI. We've pushed the boundaries of what can be done with touchscreens, and I'm excited to see a pragmatic reincorporation of physical buttons, wheels, sliders, etc.

Touchscreens are great for developers but often terrible for users.

Touchscreens are terrible for users when they replace familiar and well-established physical controls. Touchscreens have made computer interfaces far more accessible, though - lots of people you see on, say, public transit flicking expertly through their phone never got nearly as handy with a mouse or trackpad. Toddlers use touch screens while decades of command line availability saw virtually no CLI adoption in that user segment.

To me CLI is just a version of natural language processing. I think NLP will continue to gain ground. Alexa is already mainstream and I think a fair bit of the population does hands free dictation on messaging apps.

I'm really interested in NLP/messaging apps as a platform for "applications". I saw a video a couple of weeks ago showing Musk questioning why Twitter wasn't WeChat yet. I think he's on the right track here because I think people are overloaded with the schizophrenia of the web's UI. It varies so much from site to site and app to app. I think people would take nicely to a consolidation of some of their most used tasks into a single UI paradigm.

I think we're going to see lots more NLP applications in HCI but it feels more than a bit of a stretch to say CLIs are 'just a version' of NLP. The distinction between formal and natural language is a big deal and at the core of the growing importance of NLP (it kinda works now whereas before it kinda didn't).

CLIs provide structure. Real CLIs, such as the Junos operational and configuration CLIs provide rich structure and everything that comes from that.

It's not just well-established controls. Some things are simply better with physical buttons you don't have to look at. For example, I wish I had a small wheel on my wrist that I could use to control the volume of my phone/headphones.

FYI, in the technology world of 2022, HCI tends to mean Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

To all the people downvoting me, Google HCI and technology or computing and see what comes up.

It's also common courtesy to define acronyms before using them.

You’re not sincerely thinking that what _you_ see on google is indicative of the results _I_ (from another country and with obviously a very diverse search history) see, right?

If I google HCI and computing, the first “result” is one of those frames with info collected by Google, and a link to the Wikipedia page on… Human-Computer Interaction. The first actual page is “What is Human Computer Interaction?”.

HCI has been a thing way longer than whatever the thing your Google returns, and while it’s not a particularly unique acronym and could have been defined, I’d imagine is still more well-known to the average HN user than the other HCI (probably for good reason, since it’s more relatable).

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