January 30, 2026
Notes to nowhere?
Ask HN: Do you also "hoard" notes/links but struggle to turn them into actions?
Second brain or junk drawer? HN splits between do-less minimalists and AI action dreams
TLDR: A maker pitched “Concerns,” an idea to turn saved notes into actionable to-dos, and asked HN for feedback. The thread split between minimalists who say stop hoarding and just work, and tool lovers who want better search or local AI—while many warned about noisy suggestions and privacy risks.
Hacker News turned into productivity group therapy after a builder pitched “Concerns,” an action engine for Obsidian (a popular note app) that would detect your active projects, surface relevant saved stuff at the right time, and push concrete next steps into your to‑do app. There’s no product yet—just a survey and landing page—but the confessions and hot takes flew.
The mood? Equal parts “please fix my digital attic” and “touch my workflow and I riot.” The minimalist camp lit it up: one user flatly declared “A note is not an intention,” while another said they quit hoarding altogether and now live on filtered digests—less input, more output. A third proudly waved the old‑school flag: a plain notes.txt and a quick text search (“grep”) beats any fancy system, thank you very much.
Tool tinkerers fought back. Some begged for smarter “fuzzy” search and even a local AI helper to sift daily notes. Others swore by Logseq’s wiki‑style links, saying the point of personal knowledge tools is thinking, not turning every thought into a shipped feature. Meanwhile, privacy and noise alarms blared at the idea of reading calendars, code repos, and task boards to auto‑suggest actions. The only consensus? Our “second brains” keep turning into digital junk drawers—and whether the cure is fewer inputs, better search, or a pushy AI sidekick is the fight of the day.
Key Points
- •The author proposes “Concerns,” an action engine aimed at converting captured notes/links into actionable work.
- •There is no product yet; only a landing page and a short survey are being used to validate user pain and demand.
- •Core functions: detect active projects, surface relevant material at the right time, and propose concrete next actions into existing task tools.
- •The design exploration focuses on identifying project context signals (e.g., repos/PRs, issues, tasks, calendar, project docs) and defining a feedback loop that learns from outcomes.
- •Open questions include the cleanest feedback signal (ratings, completion events, doc write-back) and user constraints around privacy, noise, and workflow changes.