20th Jun 2008
The News project is coming closer
The news project I’ve been talking about is now much closer for public release than ever - currently it uses 9000 news sources, but the number only depends on how much can I optimize the software as it’s fully automatic (I don’t even have to point the sources to it - it does it on its own). I first started it by manually adding news sources, but then I’ve realized that I’d have to pay attention, so I’ve decided to use the Applauso-meter (The Simpsons) 
ok, jk, I’ve decided that I don’t want to do that, so next few weeks it was a matter of writing automated news-adder
The project is moving very slowly due to a lot of setbacks. Like when I started it with 100 000 sources and it took scheduler 28 hours to get the idea that it’s 28 hours late to pick up the news (it was still doing the first pass).
Schedule optimizer was also one of the worst thing I’ve yet had to develop. It tries to predict when’s the news coming to a site to optimize the number of visits to that site. The problem is it takes 5-10 hours for it to develop the schedule and only by that moment I can figure out if it works or not.
So, the project has already been restarted like 30-40 times from the ground up, but it finally seems to be working. It still needs a complete rewrite, but for now it should do.
Anyway, stay tuned, the release date is hopefully going to be within a week or maybe two. And if this project could bring in some money to pay for all the servers it uses - who knows - maybe it could even be up to 100 000 news sources this year
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