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Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#171

Post by item007 »

flexagoon wrote: post #168
kyriakos wrote: post #156

I use self hosted https://karakeep.app/ to keep links I find interesting. In a year of use I think I only went back twice to find a link I saved. That means most of the time the stuff I think I need to keep for later are useless.

I also use Karakeep, but for me the value is in the full text search + AI tagging. I very often remember some page or article I visited a while ago and want to revisit it, only to not be able to find it because I don't remember where it was. Karakeep essentially acts as my own personal search engine to let me search through the best pages I visited.

That makes sense — treating it as a personal search engine is a real, high-ROI use case. Full-text search covers the “I remember the idea but not where I saw it” problem really well.

Out of curiosity, what’s the bigger win for you: full-text search itself, or the tagging/metadata layer that helps narrow results when your memory is fuzzy? And do you mostly search by keywords, or by “context” (project/topic you’re working on)?

I’m validating a similar retrieval-first angle (summarized in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#172

Post by dexdal »

Neywiny wrote: post #169
item007 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, and your setup is honestly the “good enough” baseline for a lot of people: notes.txt near the work, grep when needed, and promote to README/wiki when it becomes shared. Also to clarify: I’m not focused on Obsidian specifically. “Notes” here includes anything you stash for later—notes.txt files, links, emails, chat snippets, tickets, bookmarks, random scratchpad windows. The thing I’m exploring is wh…

I think options 1 and 4. I like the idea of 4. I was trying out one of these projects and indexes a codebase with AI to make asking questions about it easier. I ran the numbers and it was going to take 24 hours of crunching on my 7900xtx. I just gave up instead. Zero setup should include not needing to do that. 3 would be the hardest but most useful thing. The problem is that it's scattered around different computers…

Indexing everything becomes unbounded fast. Shrink scope to one source of truth and a small curated corpus. Capture notes in one repeatable format, tag by task, and prune on a fixed cadence. That keeps retrieval predictable and keeps the model inside constraints.

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#173

Post by item007 »

Neywiny wrote: post #169
item007 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, and your setup is honestly the “good enough” baseline for a lot of people: notes.txt near the work, grep when needed, and promote to README/wiki when it becomes shared. Also to clarify: I’m not focused on Obsidian specifically. “Notes” here includes anything you stash for later—notes.txt files, links, emails, chat snippets, tickets, bookmarks, random scratchpad windows. The thing I’m exploring is wh…

I think options 1 and 4. I like the idea of 4. I was trying out one of these projects and indexes a codebase with AI to make asking questions about it easier. I ran the numbers and it was going to take 24 hours of crunching on my 7900xtx. I just gave up instead. Zero setup should include not needing to do that. 3 would be the hardest but most useful thing. The problem is that it's scattered around different computers…

That’s a really important definition of “zero setup”: no long-running indexing jobs, and no “crunch for 24 hours on my laptop” just to make search usable.

And I hear you on cross-network fragmentation — in a lot of real environments the hardest part isn’t search quality, it’s that data lives on different machines, different networks, and you only have partial visibility at any given time.

If you had to pick, would you rather have:

1.instant local indexing over whatever is reachable right now (even if incomplete), or

2.a lightweight distributed approach that can index in-place on each machine/network and only share metadata/results across boundaries?

I’m exploring this “latency + partial visibility” constraint as a first-class requirement (more context in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#174

Post by item007 »

dexdal wrote: post #172
Neywiny wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think options 1 and 4. I like the idea of 4. I was trying out one of these projects and indexes a codebase with AI to make asking questions about it easier. I ran the numbers and it was going to take 24 hours of crunching on my 7900xtx. I just gave up instead. Zero setup should include not needing to do that. 3 would be the hardest but most useful thing. The problem is that it's scattered around different computers…

Indexing everything becomes unbounded fast. Shrink scope to one source of truth and a small curated corpus. Capture notes in one repeatable format, tag by task, and prune on a fixed cadence. That keeps retrieval predictable and keeps the model inside constraints.

That’s another strong point, and I think it’s the pragmatic default: shrink scope, keep one source of truth, enforce a repeatable format, and prune on a cadence. It’s basically how you keep both retrieval and any automation predictable.

The tension I’m trying to understand is that in a lot of real setups the “corpus” isn’t voluntarily curated — it’s fragmented across machines/networks/tools, and the opportunity cost of “move everything into one place” is exactly why people fall back to grep and ad-hoc search.

Do you think the right answer is always “accept the constraint and curate harder”, or is there a middle ground where you can keep sources where they are but still get reliable re-entry (even if it’s incomplete/partial)?

I’m collecting constraints like this as the core design input (more context in my HN profile/bio if you want to compare notes).

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#175

Post by flexagoon »

item007 wrote: post #171
flexagoon wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use Karakeep, but for me the value is in the full text search + AI tagging. I very often remember some page or article I visited a while ago and want to revisit it, only to not be able to find it because I don't remember where it was. Karakeep essentially acts as my own personal search engine to let me search through the best pages I visited.

That makes sense — treating it as a personal search engine is a real, high-ROI use case. Full-text search covers the “I remember the idea but not where I saw it” problem really well. Out of curiosity, what’s the bigger win for you: full-text search itself, or the tagging/metadata layer that helps narrow results when your memory is fuzzy? And do you mostly search by keywords, or by “context” (project/topic you’re work…

Given that your comment is AI generated I don't know if you're actually interested or just want to plug your product, though I'll assume good faith and answer the question

I don't manually tag any entries - the automatic AI tags just add extra keywords I can search for that are not included in the original article text. So I mostly search by keywords, yes. Not sure what the difference is between "keywords" and "topic you're working on".

See also https://mymind.com, which takes the AI tagging even further. Potentially similar to what you're building (although, again, your landing page contains a lot of AI generated metaphors and nothing that explains what your product actually does)

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#176

Post by item007 »

flexagoon wrote: post #175
item007 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense — treating it as a personal search engine is a real, high-ROI use case. Full-text search covers the “I remember the idea but not where I saw it” problem really well. Out of curiosity, what’s the bigger win for you: full-text search itself, or the tagging/metadata layer that helps narrow results when your memory is fuzzy? And do you mostly search by keywords, or by “context” (project/topic you’re work…

Given that your comment is AI generated I don't know if you're actually interested or just want to plug your product, though I'll assume good faith and answer the question I don't manually tag any entries - the automatic AI tags just add extra keywords I can search for that are not included in the original article text. So I mostly search by keywords, yes. Not sure what the difference is between "keywords" and "topic…

As mentioned in my current Ask HN post, the product is indeed not yet finalized or launched. The envisioned product, Concerns, acts as a bridge, linking your current concerns and target tasks to your knowledge base/resource repository and action list (which could be to-do lists, calendars, etc.), forming an organic closed-loop system. Using target/active projects within Concerns as triggers, it retrieves relevant information from your resource repository. It proactively pushes solutions, plans, and suggestions for users to filter. Selected items then enter the user's action list. The goal is to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in a lightweight manner, without altering existing habits for using resource repositories or action lists.

This idea stems from my own pain points, and I genuinely hope that while solving my own issues, it might also address broader needs.

Regarding your response: It's interesting that AI tagging primarily aids by adding extra searchable keywords. However, I'd prefer broader content and semantic search/matching capabilities without relying solely on tags—though tagging remains a viable implementation approach. Thanks for the mymind reference—I'll explore it.

PS. Did you perceive an AI-driven approach because I used translation software?

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#177

Post by flexagoon »

item007 wrote: post #176
flexagoon wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that your comment is AI generated I don't know if you're actually interested or just want to plug your product, though I'll assume good faith and answer the question I don't manually tag any entries - the automatic AI tags just add extra keywords I can search for that are not included in the original article text. So I mostly search by keywords, yes. Not sure what the difference is between "keywords" and "topic…

As mentioned in my current Ask HN post, the product is indeed not yet finalized or launched. The envisioned product, Concerns, acts as a bridge, linking your current concerns and target tasks to your knowledge base/resource repository and action list (which could be to-do lists, calendars, etc.), forming an organic closed-loop system. Using target/active projects within Concerns as triggers, it retrieves relevant inf…

> PS. Did you perceive an AI-driven approach because I used translation software?

Are you using an LLM-based translation tool? I perceived your comment as AI mostly based on the first paragraph:

> That makes sense — treating it as a personal search engine is a real, high-ROI use case. Full-text search covers the “I remember the idea but not where I saw it” problem really well.

This is very much an LLM-style "That's a great idea!" type response. I usually don't even notice when something is LLM generated, but this part really stood out even to me.

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#178

Post by item007 »

sureglymop wrote: post #160

I'm working on a project in this realm. Basically I am building a "personal" spyware/data collection software suite. Kind of in the same realm as ms recall but more focused on security/privacy with sensible cryptographic defaults where needed. It is basically a server/data store and client agents, currently the agent is only for linux end user devices. The agent records evdev events (keystrokes/mouse movement), curre…

This is a super interesting (and refreshingly candid) direction. You’re basically building a local-first “life event ledger” with delayed sync.

Actually, I'm not an expert in this area, but I feel the challenge may not lie in data collection itself, but rather in ensuring the data remains secure, usable, and easy to maintain over many years.

A custom binary format can work, but it could be a long-term maintenance commitment (schema evolution, tooling, corruption recovery).

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#179

Post by koakuma-chan »

item007 wrote: post #125
koakuma-chan wrote: post #15

I just read AI summaries nowadays. I tried Obsidian and didn't find it useful.

AI summaries are useful, but I agree: summaries only reduce the “reading/organizing” effort — they don’t solve “what should I do next” or “why does this matter to my current goals”. What I’m exploring is the step after summarization: take the summary and explicitly link it to an active goal/project, then force a small decision: 1. ignore it 2. save as reference for Project X 3. extract 1 concrete next action (with a…

What is it that you read that can yield an "action" and what kind of "action"?

Re: Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?

#180

Post by item007 »

flexagoon wrote: post #177
item007 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned in my current Ask HN post, the product is indeed not yet finalized or launched. The envisioned product, Concerns, acts as a bridge, linking your current concerns and target tasks to your knowledge base/resource repository and action list (which could be to-do lists, calendars, etc.), forming an organic closed-loop system. Using target/active projects within Concerns as triggers, it retrieves relevant inf…

> PS. Did you perceive an AI-driven approach because I used translation software? Are you using an LLM-based translation tool? I perceived your comment as AI mostly based on the first paragraph: > That makes sense — treating it as a personal search engine is a real, high-ROI use case. Full-text search covers the “I remember the idea but not where I saw it” problem really well. This is very much an LLM-style "That's a…

It seems like most software now integrates LLM... Can't escape it, sigh.

The mymind you recommended has made significant strides toward tackling “information overload” and “organization fatigue.” However, I feel it remains fundamentally a storage solution—reducing the effort of organizing and facilitating retrieval—but doesn't directly align with my target.

It also reminds me of another product, youmind (https://youmind.com/), though it's primarily geared toward creation rather than PKM. Perhaps I could pay to try its advanced AI features.

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