HPI Alternatives

HPI reviews and mentions

• Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Oct 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!

  [1]: https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

• Implement the Sovereign Individual (1997) + AI
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Apr 2025
• Surfer is the first personal data scraper
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Aug 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.

  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 really fancy, 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.

• Imagining a Personal Data Pipeline
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Aug 2024
• First Personal Search Engine Prototype
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Dec 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 all my work in favor of building off theirs.

  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 Firefox 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.

  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.

  [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

• I put my whole life into a single database
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Apr 2022

  My version of this: Human Programming Interface https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

  It's a bit heavier on the automatic data aggregation side, but has some manual inputs as data sources too.

• “Obtaining My Personal Data from Amazon Was a Nightmare”
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2022
• Gains I'm Seeing from My Second Brain Tool
  13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2022

  This is my approach!

  I'm using HPI [0] as a sort of universal API for almost all of my data (manual notes, bookmarks, instant messages, internet comments, etc)

  Then I use it in tools like Orger [1] and Promnesia [2] which function as my second brain

  [0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

  [1] https://github.com/karlicoss/orger

  [2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

• Electric Tables – an experiment in personal databases
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jan 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. 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

• Ask HN: Who Wants to Collaborate?
  58 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2022

  I'm working on tools/projects to unify, access, interact and use my personal data for quantified self, knowledge management, etc.

  A couple of examples:

  - https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme

  - https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme

  Would very much love to discuss it with other people, collaborate etc.

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