FUTURE-006: Alternative News Sources (HN, Reddit, RSS)
Status: Idea (not started) Priority: Low (Exa already covers most) Effort: Low Cost: Free
Problem
Exa indexes many sources but may miss niche communities or have latency on certain platforms. Alternative sources could provide:
- Hacker News - Tech industry sentiment, startup news
- Reddit - Community-specific signals (r/politics, r/wallstreetbets, r/sportsbook)
- RSS feeds - Direct from authoritative sources (Fed, official blogs)
Proposed Solution
Add alternative news providers as optional research sources:
# Search Hacker News for topic
kalshi research hn "prediction markets"
# Get Reddit sentiment for a topic
kalshi research reddit "Trump election" --subreddits politics,conservative
# Add RSS feed to tracking
kalshi news add-feed "https://federalreserve.gov/feeds/press_all.xml"
Why Low Priority
- Exa already indexes these - HN, Reddit, major RSS are in Exa's index
- Latency is acceptable - These aren't real-time sources anyway
- Effort vs value - Direct API integration adds maintenance burden
When This Becomes Higher Priority
- If Exa pricing becomes prohibitive
- If specific subreddit/HN signals prove valuable in manual testing
- If you need real-time Reddit/HN monitoring (WebSocket)
Implementation Notes
Hacker News
- Official API:
https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/ - Algolia search:
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search - Free, no auth required
- Official API requires OAuth app registration
- Rate limited (60 req/min authenticated)
- Consider Pushshift for historical data (if still available)
RSS
- Standard RSS/Atom parsing (feedparser library)
- Store in existing news tables
- Scheduled collection like Exa news
Dependencies
- Could integrate with existing
newsmodule - Optional: ResearchProvider interface for unified queries
Open Questions
- Is the marginal value over Exa worth the maintenance?
- Which specific subreddits/HN topics are most predictive?
- Store full content or just metadata?
Acceptance Criteria
To be defined when promoted to spec.