Planning to hack over the holidays? Heroku & Indextank Search contest | Hacker News Reader

Planning to hack over the holidays? Heroku & Indextank Search contest

blog.heroku.com

44 pointsdiego16 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm in the same boat as you. I thought there was built in ways of searching things like that so I started to think of some ideas for an entry. Was disappointed when I realized I'd have to sit down and scrape and populate a ton of data. Though I'll still probably wind up doing this.

Missed some Python:

Import the IndexTank client library to the Python interpreter by typing the following command at the Python prompt.

irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems' irb(main):002:0> require 'indextank'

Fixed, thanks :)

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?

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.

I think that is to prevent money laundering.

How about a special mention for non-US contestants.

I know that Quebec, for one, is horrible for contests/competitions. Something to do with having to give the province 10% of the value of the contest prizes.

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

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://wikiriver.org/

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

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

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