It's a Python script I run every 5 minutes with cron. It uses BeautifulSoup to scrape the newsyc front page, Tweepy to send out out tweets, and sqlite3 to keep track of which stories have already been tweeted.
Why use an sqlite DB when you can use the twitter feed its self to check whether or not a story has been posted?
Because twitter is unstable, and the api is rate-limited.