Phil Jahner
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2020–2026
0:26 · 361K views · Apr 30, 2010
A short clip from Star Trek IV in which Scotty tries to talk to a 20th-century computer, picks up the mouse and says 'Hello, computer'.
HN uses it as a joke in threads about voice interfaces and talking to computers.
3 comments from Hacker News
I’m working on something similar. The target market is the 99% of people who want to program ad-hoc domain-specific problems. For example, generating charts w/o having to dig through all the data sources (Wolfram Alpha does a simple version of this). Building a financial risk model for a client’s specific request (you have to be a whiz at Excel, python or some internal ide). Even for home automation, my mom can’t use Alexa’s awful app to customize routines. I don’t think the voice part is necessary. It’s easy enough to slap ASR on the front. But going from natural language -> full problem spec -> code is hard in the general case, but doable in well-understood domains. Why can’t Scotty talk to a computer? ( this video )
I may date myself here, but the first thing that popped into my head when I read the title of this post was this scene from ST IV: this video It's kinda funny watching someone without a background in CS repeatedly ask google/alexa/siri a question in different ways that you know isn't going to elicit any kind of useful response.
Star Trek illustrated the issue nicely in the scene where Scotty, who we should remember is an engineer, tries to talk to a computer mouse in the 20th century: this video