Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

This is why RSS for the birds.

My RSS reader YOShInOn subscribes to 110 RSS feeds through Superfeedr which absolves me of the responsibility of being on the other side of Rachel's problem.

With RSS you are always polling too fast or too slow; if you are polling too slow you might even miss items.

When a blog gets posted Superfeedr hits an AWS lambda function that stores the entry in SQS so my RSS reader can update itself at its own pace. The only trouble is Superfeedr costs 10 cents a feed per month which is a good deal for an active feed such as comments from Hacker News or article from The Guardian but is not affordable for subscribing to 2000+ indy blogs which YOShInOn could handle just fine.

I might yet write my own RSS head end, but there is something to say for protocols like ActivityPub and AT Protocol.

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That's why websub (formerly pubsubhubbub) was created and should be the proper solution, not a proprietary middleware

Superfeedr is pubsubhubhub.

Aws lambdas and sqs are not

But it is just a way to answer a webhook.

Sure I could get DNS to point to my ADSL connection and set something up in my router so that my home computer can answer the webhook but then I can never turn my computer off. On top of that I have about one power outage a month.

It would also be non-proprietary to spend $5k on a server and $300 a month on colo costs but with AWS I can use what would be 1 cent of resources if I was optimizing that colo (with $10k of labor) and pay 10 cents for it (could really be spending up to $50 on a non-optimized colo, which is what I might have if I don't need to handle a billion webhooks a month) If I want to switch to Azure or some other service that could answer a webhook the labor involved is minuscule.

Surely there's a step between self-hosting on your home computer and colocating a server you buy

Surely a $15 per year vm would be enough to receive a few thousands POSTs per day (https://tinykvm.com/), or if that's not enough, paying less than $5 per month for a VPS is still cheap

Surely transposing a binary hosted on vendor A to vendor B is as minuscule in involved labor as configuring a webhook

I'm not trying to diss on your own reader which is an awesome thing to do, I'm just sad that resorting to a fully proprietary architecture is an automatism when considering a protocol that can't be more open than RSS

I see those $5/mo or $15/yr VMs as pretty expensive. In the penny-pinching mindset you lowball your RAM which is fine on a good day but it runs out when it gets a load spike. So you need a monitoring system of some kind, backup, and so on, ...

w/ AWS I get all kinds of charts or alarms free or very cheap. The lambda is about 20 lines of Python code, I was able to complete part of the project that I was uninterested in at the time very quickly. Later on it took maybe 2-3 hours to make a UI that would let me add, view and remove feeds from my reader's UI.

YOShInOn's recommendation engine and UI were a research project however that was high-risk and might not have worked so it wouldn't have made sense to develop a better head end.

A better head end is on the agenda today but that system has a lot of other problems such as a dangerously large database that needs to be pruned, O(N) algorithms that were fine for the first year, other problems on the tail end. And it competes with other systems.

My experience is I can set something like this up in AWS and just not think about it for years.

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