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karlicoss
HPI
Python2020–2025
karlicoss / HPI

HPI

Human Programming Interface 🧑👽🤖

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6Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Human Programming Interface 🧑👽🤖

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year17 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-05-08 09:31:58 UTC to 2025-10-08 11:17:44 UTC.

02462020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

17 sources
novoreorx·Oct 8, 2025
This reminds me of a similar project called HPI [1] that I discovered in 2022, the idea to aggregate one's digital footprints into one single private place really inspires me a lot. Timelinize is almost like a GUI version of HPI, a more sophisticated user product that everyone can use. I will definitely try it, congrats and respect! P.S. HPI has many existing exporters, so it might be helpful to extend Timelinize's capacity. [1]: https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI
In Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally
madamelic·Aug 23, 2024
Take a look at https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI It builds an entire ecosystem around your data where it is programmatic rather than just dumping text files. The point of HPI is to build your own stuff onto it and it all integrates seamlessly together into one Python package. The next stop after Karlicoss is https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/HPI_API which creates a REST API on top of your HPI without any additional configuration. If you want to get more fancy / antithetical to HPI, you can use https://github.com/hpi/authenticated_hpi_api or https://github.com/hpi/hpi-graph so you can theoretically expose it to the web (I am squatting the HPI org, I am not the creator of HPI). I made the authentication method JWTs so you can create JWTs where it will give access to only certain services' data. (Beware, hpi-graph is very out of date and I
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haven't touched it lately but my HPI stuff has been chugging away downloading data). Some of the /hpi stuff I made is a bit mish-mash because it was rip-and-replace from a project I was making so you'll see references to "Archivist" or things that aren't local-first and depend on Vercel applications.
In Surfer: Centralize all your personal data from online platforms
madamelic·Dec 31, 2023
If this is interesting to you, you should check out the interesting work that karlicoss and others have done with "Human Programming Interface" [0] / [1]. I've been kicking this idea around for quite a few years and have gone through multiple iterations before finding HPI and tossing out or adapting all my work in favor of building off theirs. Mine is a bit more service / cloud oriented in how it runs (shocker... at one point I made it into a product) while HPI is heavily local-first for obvious good reasons. HPI is a great platform to build your own stuff off and benefit from all the work that has already been done because imo building a good foundation is the hardest part. Sean Breckenridge's HPI-API is super interesting and useful, could likely be worked into this search engine concept, quite sure Sean actually has both newsboat and Fi
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refox modules already made. I wrote modules of my own and made an authentication wrapped HPI-API and a GraphQL instance but currently in the middle of an infra move so nothing super cool to show off. At one point I had a dashboard powered by it but we all know how these one-off internal-use-only projects end up. :) I think the most interesting thing I've written for HPI is my ActivityWatch syncing. It's been happily churning away for years and during my infra move, I discovered that it had about 20GB of activity data stockpiled. Multiple years of down to the second cataloguing of everything I did and saw on the computer. Lots of interesting stuff in collecting and leveraging your data. If any of this stuff catches your eye, I highly encourage browsing karlicoss' exobrain [2] because there are some interesting things in there. I post all of this to hopefully save someone (or many people) time because I recall how dejected I felt having spent multiple weekends chipping at a problem someone already solved better. I think this previous discussion was where I discovered it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26269832 [0]: https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI [1]: my own stuff, not trying to step on Karli, just wanted a 3 letter org for my stuff: https://github.com/hpi [2]: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html
In First personal search engine prototype
diegoveralli·Jan 27, 2022
The code is here: https://github.com/diegov/searchbox But don't let its attempt at a friendly README fool you, it's personal-grade software of "works-on-my-machine", and barely, quality. If you want to look at something more polished, I think https://github.com/amirgamil/apollo and https://github.com/thesephist/monocle are worth taking a look. Also there's the https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI library, which you could build on, though it mainly relies on data dumps from the different services instead of crawling and fetching through APIs, which is why I didn't use it. Keeping up with API changes is bad enough, I don't want to deal with undocumented dump formats...
In How I centralize and distribute my bookmarks
cobertos·Jan 27, 2022
I suppose HPI[0] kind of is that? ;) A community repository would be super nice for those. Something along the lines of DefinitelyTyped[1], all managed through git, easily integrates with other stuff (like shown on npmjs.org when the @types package exists), allows maintainers to "own" the adapters they contribute by making a PR. It's really the N adapters * T time per adapter that really makes it hard for one person to do. That plus monitoring API changes/flakiness of each adapter to make sure the data is still solid. [0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI [1] https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped
In Show HN: Electric Tables – an experiment in personal databases
karlicoss·May 19, 2021
Some of my favourites: - "5. Life engine" and "92. Personal Data API" I'm working on this in "Human Programming Interface" :) https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme It's far from solving these in general, but it works for me very well. - "73. Web Of Trust Recommendations" Oh yes, I wish this so much -- it's much more meaningful to see recommendations from someone I know than generic ratings on Amazon. Also I don't think it should be limited to products and services -- imagine if you could also have some decentralized reputation framework for politicians/public figures etc. - "33. Personal infrastructure" and "64. Peer to peer backup" Syncthing is missing, who have added 'untrusted devices' recently https://docs.syncthing.net/users/untrusted.html This lets you keep encrypted files on the other end. Great list, also see - https://github.co
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m/samsquire/ideas2 - https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3
In One Hundred Ideas for Computing
karlicoss·Apr 12, 2021
Nice work! > The end goal is to have an application running on terminal or raspberry 24/7 plugged into my home network, without access to internet. As far as I understand you're using it as the primary interface for all your data, but in case you want to import some external data sources too, you might be interested in a project I started [0]. You can take periodic snapshots of you online data, and then use it as a fully offline programmatic API to integrate with other services, and potentially use in your dashboard as well. Perhaps if you glance at the diagram [1] it might become clearer how it fits :) [0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme [1] https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html#fs
In Show HN: Personal Data Management Dashboard
karlicoss·Mar 15, 2021
Nice talk! 16:00 "fission drive" sounds exciting, so in principle I can have data on my disk, also distributed via IPFS and available to local-first apps. This is something I've had in mind as a "data mirror" [0], it would be cool to interoperate with data from various silos and build apps/alternative clients on top of it. I've got a bunch of data extractors/normalisers already [1], would be interesting to try and connect it! By the way, for demonstrating offline mode, both Chrome/FF devtools have network throttling (which is also useful for triggering/testing race conditions). In Chrome offline mode is also in devtools, in firefox offline mode is in "menu - more - work offline" (which is a bit less convenient, but still) [0] https://beepb00p.xyz/sad-infra.html#data_mirror [1] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme
In IPFS Local Offline Collaboration Sig
rektide·Feb 20, 2021
> Can I get a raise of hands for folks who think "Dream Machines" is the #1 book on software? How about for those who believe that Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect is a driving force for humanity? And that software is a radical embodiment of that all? I think we can get a modest show of hands; I've seen enough confirming points of view from about. (Would that I have a memex to highlight all the mentions I've seen, all the other endorsements!) Me, about an hour ago[1], in the "How can you not be romantic about software?" discussion. Amusing to see Doug echoed back on HN so quickly. Small world! It's in reply to one of the most critical pieces of the thread, to me. The overarching article is somewhat fetishistic, just in to the wizardry of it all, the power, the skill. I was replying specifically to someone promoting the use of person
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al knowledge systems, to capture everything you are learning, to build a log & indexes. This, really, is the heart of what I find so romantic: this augmentative, compounding nature of software, of informatics. To gain heightened view points, and to make ourselves steersmen[2]. That thread included a shout out to Karli Coss, who has done more than anyone I've seen to draw together all the streams, to gather & create views of his own existence as it forms across the digital[2]. He's brought a wide range of software- from ebook readers to music players to web browsers- into his own domain, to build his extended brain. Karli has augmented his intellect far further than anyone else. There's a lot of compelling things about software, a lot of ways to have fun. But of the ways to be romantic about programming, Augmenting Human Intellect is the most profound & resounding romantic notions that I have ever encountered. I see so many people engaged in software, but this seems like the core of where almost all real true meaning lives, and we should reshape our focus, abandon so much software, to chase an integrative, augmentative vision of computing in pursuit of this romance. We should be inspired, as Doug was. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208453 [3] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#whats-inside
In Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
karlicoss·Feb 20, 2021
(author of Promnesia here) In fact I do have my pinboard as one of the data sources! Although it's running against the raw json export, rather than a specific module at the moment. Something like this: PINBOARD = Source( auto.index, last('/data/pinboard/bookmarks*.json'), name='pinboard', ) Now that my HPI (https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI) thing has Pinboard support, I guess makes sense to add a proper module to Promnesia... I'll get to it one day unless someone else wants to give it a go
In A request for Pinboard old-timers

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