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beepb00p

Personal blog · beepb00p.xyz · on HN as karlicossprogrammingdata

beepb00p is a personal blog at beepb00p.xyz about programming and data. Since 2019, 47 different Hacker News readers have linked it 169 times, most often “Show HN: Promnesia – an attempt to fix broken web history”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.

Visit the blog
169mentions?
47HN people?
2019–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 55 in 2020

The author on HN?

karlicoss · 3,247 karma · member since 2016

Trapped in meatspace. Trying to break out. I build things: https://beepb00p.xyz https://github.com/karlicoss https://twitter.com/karlicoss

From their public HN profile, which links to this site.

Most-linked posts?

  1. Show HN: Promnesia – an attempt to fix broken web history
    11 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2020-06-06
  2. Map of my personal data infrastructure
    10 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2020-05-23
  3. Against Unnecessary Databases
    7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-01-27
  4. Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code
    5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-11-28
  5. Statically-typed error handling in Python using Mypy
    4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-10-30
  6. How to annotate everything
    4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-11-15
  7. The sad state of personal data and infrastructure
    4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-12-17
  8. Show HN: Interface for all digital aspects of my life
    3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-03-19
  9. What data on myself I collect and why (2020)
    3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-01-12
  10. Configs suck? Try a real programming language
    3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-04-05

What Hacker News says?

  1. James is one of the world's great techno-adventurers, & getting to para-socially share in wild adventures like this makes living on Spaceship Earth more lovely & lively! James has also done cool projects like sweet.js macros, helped kick off Firefox devtool's transition to react (iirc), oh and lead the basically industry standard JS formatter Priettier project. I'm forgetting a dozen other things over the years but…

    Comment linking /myinfra.html

    on “A future for SQL on the web”
  2. Submitted Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code as a story · 661 points

    HN discussion
  3. Mine is https://beepb00p.xyz One big theme is owning you personal data, building infrastructure for that, and tools to work with it. A good start to explore this might be "How to cope with having a fleshy human brain": https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-setup.html Some posts are more centered about programming specifics for designing such tools, in particular, Python. A related topic I blog about is quantified self, lifeloggi…

    Comment linking /pkm-setup.html

    on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”
  4. Submitted Show HN: Interface for all digital aspects of my life as a story · 478 points

    HN discussion
  5. Pretty cool! I've done lots of work to unify data from different web/local/phone sources as well, you might find my post useful: https://beepb00p.xyz/hpi.html

    Comment linking /hpi.html

    on “Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?”
  6. Submitted How to annotate everything as a story · 315 points

    HN discussion
  7. I have an idea for a project (I call it 'cannon' for now)[0] which would 'canonicalize' URLs and extract semantic information from it, ideally just by looking at the URL, without doing any extra requests. For example, a tweet URL usually encodes the tweet author and tweet ID; and by extracting such entities one could determine 'relations' between URLs. I'm using a simple prototype in Promnesia [1], a browser extensi…

    Comment linking /exobrain/projects/cannon.html

    on “ClearURLs – automatically remove tracking elements from URLs”
  8. Submitted Map of my personal data infrastructure as a story · 299 points

    HN discussion
  9. https://beepb00p.xyz I mostly write about data liberation, quantified self and knowledge management. Some notable links: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html -- map of my personal data infrastructure (usually people say I'm a bit mad after seeing this :) ) https://beepb00p.xyz/blog-graph.html -- a nice visual way to explore my posts https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain -- my "external brain", basically public notes/links dump

    Comment linking /exobrain

    on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”
  10. Submitted Configs suck? Try a real programming language as a story · 289 points

    HN discussion
  11. Matt, did you see Promnesia? https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html There are a lot of converging ideas out there, for "self-hosted NSA of yourself" type software which gather your own data from services you use and index it / make it more accessible to users. Would love to see something serious come out of it. I followed Timeliner early on and really like the idea, but yeah it's a bitch to get traction for this sort o…

    Comment linking /promnesia.html

    on “Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage in June 2021”
  12. Submitted The sad state of personal data and infrastructure as a story · 289 points

    HN discussion
  13. I'm kind of working on that too :) https://github.com/karlicoss/my I wrote a post on some data that I collect and have/will integrate: https://beepb00p.xyz/my-data.html#consumers

    Comment linking /my-data.html

    on “Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code”
  14. Submitted Show HN: Promnesia – an attempt to fix broken web history as a story · 234 points

    HN discussion
  15. That's cool, please drop me an email (or just share here?) when you release it, I'm collecting ( https://beepb00p.xyz/tags.html#exobrain ) other people's wikis!

    Comment linking /tags.html

    on “Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code”
  16. Submitted Statically-typed error handling in Python using Mypy as a story · 198 points

    HN discussion
  17. The holy grail [ https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#future ] of this really resonated with me and fully mirrors what I've been thinking about the past few months. In my observations, it's input capture, information organization, and subsequent retrieval: Information Capture: Input Capture - You’re going to have all-encompassing tracking and recording of all activity, but want configurable privacy on the extent to…

    Comment linking /pkm-search.html

    on “Building personal search infrastructure for your knowledge and code”
  18. Submitted What data on myself I collect and why (2020) as a story · 187 points

    HN discussion
  19. https://beepb00p.xyz/sad-infra.html This one had some impact on me because it revived the importance of taking ownership not only on my personal data, but the infrastructure which generates it, processes and stores it; and that the same infrastructure should be well thought of by me through a tinkering process which adds value to itself and to data the more I invest time on it. I felt very motivated to rethink my wo…

    Comment linking /sad-infra.html

    on “Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?”
  20. Submitted Cloudmacs: access your Emacs in browser as a story · 124 points

    HN discussion
  21. https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html

    Comment linking /pkm-search.html

    on “I've been writing TILs for 5 years”
  22. Submitted In search of a better job scheduler as a story · 112 points

    HN discussion
  23. https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html is, to me, the definitive go to "look how ultra we could be" site of yours, @karlicoss. i show this off to people on the regular, it's so impressive. i feel like there's such a gap, that it takes such dedicatiom & effort to have the digital world we interact with report back & give us the facts of whats occured. i dont know what futures this obstructs but it's a drain on general hum…

    Comment linking /myinfra.html

    on “I put my whole life into a single database”
  24. Submitted Building data liberation infrastructure as a story · 77 points

    HN discussion
  25. Thanks, I'll check it out! Yep, agree about the common codebase, that's why I'm trying to keep everything modular and thinking a lot about it. I describe this bit of my philosophy/design here [0]. I've only written parsers/exporters if I haven't found any (or any that wouldn't be a complete pain to adapt) so far. Google Takeout processing is a part of HPI, but I was going to extract it in a separate repository, so p…

    Comment linking /exports.html

    on “Show HN: Interface for all digital aspects of my life”
  26. Submitted Promnesia – A journey in fixing browser history (2020) as a story · 33 points

    HN discussion
  27. Ooooh, I totally forgot to add your link, I remember you commenting, sorry! Will amend now. Ah I see, so your approach is using databases as an 'intermediate' layer, rather than the main source of 'truth'. My main objection to databases is the fricton with the maintenance and the speed of prototyping, but if it's automatic and used as a cache, I agree it's reasonable. Although I'd still be worried about normalising…

    Comment linking /unnecessary-db.html

    on “Show HN: Interface for all digital aspects of my life”
  28. Submitted Annotating literally everything: overview of tools and techniques as a story · 11 points

    HN discussion
  29. My version of this is called Dogsheep, and involves building tools that suck my data from various sources into SQLite databases so I can query it all using Datasette. https://dogsheep.github.io/ I enjoyed reading this author's essay on why he doesn't think loading everything into relational databases is the best approach: https://beepb00p.xyz/unnecessary-db.html I think I have a workarounds for most of the issues he…

    Comment linking /unnecessary-db.html

    on “Show HN: Interface for all digital aspects of my life”
  30. Submitted How to Annotate Everything as a story · 10 points

    HN discussion

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