What has become of my beloved HN? Doesn't a devout 20 minutes three times a day on HN count as meditation.

Next we'll be discussing horoscopes...

Doesn't work for me Chrome 9.0.597.98 beta on Ubuntu :( Possibly because all HTTP traffic has to go through a proxy server, the company block all outbound traffic, and require a proxy server.

The websocket is also on port 8080 so that could be an issue

I'd love to hear the concepts behind this, I'm guessing you first do a radial search from current location, yield list twitter handles, fetch last n dozen tweets, extract links, cluster, intersect, introduce.

I don't have a 4[] account to try it but im curious what you used. Obviously in 8 hours there's only limited technology that can be done, but if you're using python or another language with a rich set of libraries it's possible to do quite a lot during that time. Obviously 8 hours means 6 when you factor in HN time :)

Foursquare has a API method that exposes the people who are at the same place than you are. Then we get their twitter nicknames and find who you have the most followings in common.

We use Rails 3, Memcache, Redis, Resque, Foursquare API (with Push) and Twitter API.

Thanks, that's essentially what I said, but I am curious what you mean by "most followings in common" (you mean people intersect?) I assumed you did some form of semantic analysis of the tweet streams to intersect based on common RT's or link topics?

I'm actually surprised there is a maxima between people intersects, or that it carries some meaning.

I wasn't really asking about the front-end, that seems like any of the boilerplate environments would have been equivalent, and just becomes a matter of most familiar, but rather the 'backend'.

Let's say you can write a UI, you have a lat/lon, you have the tweet streams from those around you, how, in a meaningful way do you find similarity? That's the core of your idea. Because Mike and Brett both follow JetBlue what does that tell you? However, if Mike and Brett both RT'd a link about the speed of limit hard limit, it's reasonable to assume they have some similarity in interest. That's the part I was interested in getting your thoughts (mainly because its something I've both thought about and worked on)

Try to run some computation on top of Twitter using the followings in common and you'll see that it's actually working great. We only display with whom you have more than 4 followings in common.

It has Google in the title, instant upvote for any article with Google, Quora or Stackoverflow.

what's an average person? The only way politics connects with the masses is through voting.

In retrospect, I probably should have used a term like "typical" or "statistically representative".

The point is that there are a lot of people who are currently running startups, most of whom are not much like Jobs or Zuckerberg (these are the "average" people). There are also many people who have not started a company, but who might decide to do so if circumstances changed slightly (the marginal people) [1].

In aggregate, both of these groups have just as big an impact on the economy as the few outlier successes.

[1] One might also consider startups which failed, but only barely, as marginal.

'Simplistic' is perjorative: a simplistic solution is one that's too simple to properly address the problem.

The internet is really many superimposed communities. Expecting the internet, or pretty much anything else to be a certain way is setting yourself up for unfulfilled expectation.

The internet is a rapidly changing place and filled with enormous diversity of people, views and interests.

Doesn't Facebook already have a search feature?

Its fairly limited, feature-wise.

often in text indexing the original document is kept for things like snippet generation.