Hacker News Reader

Screenshots aren't as accurate or context-rich as HTML, but they let you bypass the hassle of building logic for permissions and authentication across different apps to pull in text content for the LLM.

View on HN

Can’t you just make a browser extension to haveaccess to the HTML and CSS, and use LLMs from that?

Context length + API cost is right now main bottleneck for huge HTML + CSS files. The extraction here is already quite efficient but still: with past messages + system prompt + sometimes extracted text + extracted interactive elements you are quickly already around 2500 tokens (for gpt-4o 0.01$).

If you extract entire HTML and CSS your cost + inference time are quickly 10x.

Aren't screenshots far larger than this?

Nope: 1280x1024 low resolution with gpt-4o are 85 tokens so approx $0.0002 (so 100x cheaper). For high resolution its apporx $0.002 https://openai.com/api/pricing/

Yeah. I noticed a very low cost when I run it via vm, predefined resolution. Good tip.

I do this for my extension [0] but the HTML is often too large for context window sizes . I end up doing scraping of the relevant pieces before sending to LLM.

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/namebrand-check-for...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com