Chris Harrison is a human-computer interaction researcher who publishes papers on input methods, progress bars, and data visualization.
HN links it for his research papers, with one commenter calling the progress bar paper a great look at how progress bars shape our sense of time.
While I agree that the current generation of touch screens are rather superficial, I sincerely doubt that the future of interaction looks anything like a stylus.
For artists and designers, the stylus will be used for many years to come, but for casual, everyday use, it simply isn't user friendly. While it may be natural to draw or write on a screen with a stylus, jabbing at buttons on a screen with a stylus is no more intuitive or natural than jabbing at a screen with a finger, and in many use cases (scrolling, zooming, panning) is much less natural. The case for the stylus becomes even weaker in the face of technology like Siri, which elegantly solves the problem of text input.
The Bret Victor "Rant" mentioned in the article makes the case for exploring more dynamic, tactile, interactive experiences, decidedly not limited to one mode of input like the stylus. I, for one, hope for a future that is much more ambitious than the stylus, with new forms of interaction that combine hands, voice, and beyond. Things like this http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/PneumaticDisplays and this http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xFIRmnRHNUM that truly push the boundaries of human computer interaction.
Like a few others, I too found it an average CV (It is something very similar to what I myself have, and I consider myself an average (-; ). To be honest, there are a few others in the comments that I gravitated towards more (It's a matter of personal preference of course). Sure, the Progress bar looks new, but others too have it on them -- see v33ra's response below.
You took a chance and placed it on HN for the self-promotion/ exposure/publicity and you were (luckily) rewarded. As you can see from the comments below, there are a lot of such efforts out there and all of them very commendable as well. They just didn't feel promotional enough like you, to place it here in the first place (and all of them had also placed it on GitHub before you, so open sourcing is not an USP either).
But I felt there there was neither anything "stand-out" about the CV, nor was there anything "interactive". It is a web resume like everyone else's and that's it.
For inspiration, here's what I would consider an impressive (as in look-and-feel) web CV and something close to an "interactive" web CV: http://www.chrisharrison.net/
My two bits.
This is a cool idea. I also really like simonw’s TIL feed:
https://til.simonwillison.net/
Like a microblog of little learnings in day-to-day development.
One interesting thing that occurred to me recently is that my personal site (https://amontalenti.com) is more an essay archive and identity verification tool, than it is a “blog” or “microblog.” That is, the timestamps of the content on there are the least interesting thing about it. The most valuable page, for me, is https://amontalenti.com/archive.
As for something like /now, the most fascinating implementation of this is an old friend of mine from college. He and I were both early 2000s bloggers, but he came up with the idea, in 2001 or so, to keep a nearly-daily one sentence personal diary on his blog. He kept that up for the last 20+ years (he is nowadays a CS researcher and inventor in HCI). Very impressive near-daily microblogging habit over a lifetime!
https://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Home/Log
"Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Liquids, and Everyday Objects" [1] and "Botanicus Interacticus: Interactive Plant Technology" [2] used a single electrode and machine-learning classification in order to distinguish between different types of touches and touch locations.
Using multiple measurements (as Electrick does) provides much more robust tracking than these.
[1] http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/Touche
[2] https://www.disneyresearch.com/project/botanicus-interacticus-interactive-plant-technology/
Here's the research mentioned in the article: http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars/ProgBarHarrison.pdf
Briefly, they took a process that proceeded linearly, applied an arbitrary function to the current progress, and displayed the result in the progress bar.
The conclusion is that time taken is perceived as less when the progress appears to start slowly and then accelerate, even when the actual total time taken is the same.
The authors of Touché did a follow-up paper at UIST this year to study this exact question [1]. In brief, you can train a classifier on the impedance profile of specific users, but there are some significant limitations (impedance profiles naturally drift over time, and accuracy doesn't look so good with a lot of users).
[1] http://chrisharrison.net/projects/capacitivefingerprinting/CapFingerprinting.pdf