

Planning to hack over the holidays? Heroku & Indextank Search contest - diego
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/12/20/hacking-over-the-holidays/

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diego
Based on feedback we put together a tutorial for using IndexTank from Ruby:

<http://indextank.com/documentation/tutorial-ruby>

I would love to know if it's useful, or what's missing from it.

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steveklabnik
This is awesome.

Here's the biggest thing that seems off to me: these indexes need to be fully
populated by the programmer, right? I saw a bunch of "You could search
Twitter, think about the Sunlight foundation, here's some firehoses" but then
this (and the rest of) the tutorials seem to be all about me feeding it data
directly.

If I wanted to search the Twitter firehose, say, I'd have to do all of the
scraping and insertion myself, right? I can't just hook it up and head off?
That's what makes sense, but some of the marketing seemed to imply otherwise.

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diego
First off, thanks! To answer your question: what we'd like to do is have some
readily available data sources that you could select from a directory/list (a
lot of people have asked for that). Right now you have to write your own
listener to connect a source with our api.

I'll take a look at our docs, I want to make sure this is not misleading.

~~~
steveklabnik
No worries. It makes sense, really.

I just tried to look for the copy that made me think this, and I can't find
it.

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Janteh
_This Contest is open to software developers who are 18 years of age or older
at the time of entry and who are legal residents of the United States._

Why only the US, really?

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diego
Because our lawyers say so, I believe it's boilerplate for these contests. I'd
be super happy to open it to everyone in the known universe but I don't know
the legal implications. Happy to hear your thoughts.

~~~
sandGorgon
I think that is to prevent money laundering.

How about a special mention for non-US contestants.

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bmarashi
i wonder if anyone is going to build the wikileaks search engine? that would
be pretty interesting...

~~~
diego
You'd have to decrypt the Wikileaks insurance file first. That contest entry
would be hard to top, I would be impressed :)

[http://www.zerohedge.com/article/who-will-be-first-
decrypt-w...](http://www.zerohedge.com/article/who-will-be-first-decrypt-
wikileaks-insurance-file)

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steveklabnik
Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013777> 15 comments.

Including mine about using non-Rails frameworks on Heroku:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013919>

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frankleahy
adding indextank is on my todo list...this week hopefully.

