Well I've never used Heroku or IndexTank (or Rails for that matter), but I've had a small weekend hack I've been wanting to do for a while now involving a spattering of search. I was going to try out Solr but I think I'll learn Rails instead. I guess their marketing worked on me.
Btw, we need more hacking trophies, something made out of circuit boards, transistors, and wire, something that will put those little league "I played a sport!" trophies to shame. I suppose a Macbook will be an acceptable substitute.
A small note, if you don't want to actually use Rails, you can use any Rack-based Ruby web framework (aka all of them). You may want to also look at http://sinatrarb.com, which is much simpler than Rails.
That said, Rails is really good! Especially Rails 3.
Wait a minute, can I use heroku/indextank to build a better search for hacker news with this? I like the real time part of what i see Reddit has with indextank. Can we include votes to help sway search results? Or is this a project that HNs won't like me working on? Am very new to this.
This is just the thing to inspire me to finally research a decent search implementation for some of my projects. And I'm glad IndexTank has taken the time to write clients for stock Ruby and Python. Make my life easy.
You can do real-time search for anything with a live feed. Maybe not HN, but there are lots of sites that would be happy to see a better search function just to test-drive it.
Btw, we need more hacking trophies, something made out of circuit boards, transistors, and wire, something that will put those little league "I played a sport!" trophies to shame. I suppose a Macbook will be an acceptable substitute.