Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eugeneonai 13 days ago
Agree on RSS as the right shape — and worth adding the cost angle nobody's quantified here yet. Having an LLM read a 50KB HTML page is ~$0.03 of gpt-4o input. Polling 1000 sources hourly = ~$720/day, almost all of it tokenizing layout chrome the model throws away. RSS-shaped feeds drop that 90%+ because they strip to deltas. The harder blocker is the supply side though — publishers earn pennies per human pageview from ads and ~$0 from agent polls, so unless feeds become licensed paid endpoints, the publisher incentive runs against your "publish an RSS feed for your content" recommendation. Just like that :)