this is cool, i was thinking of doing something like this for dota coaching

(I am the other creator of this website). Thanks! We will be happy to see you on our website!

for an approach using neo4j, check out cadet! (my project) cadet is more just a jruby wrapper around neo4j, but one can use it to interact with neo4j (and thus come up with recommendations without touching a line of java, or even cypher )

still in progress, and id love any input! http://github.com/karabijavad/cadet

http://github.com/karabijavad/congress-graph

is postgres as quick as neo4j, in your use case? ive really been into neo4j lately, but im curious if postgres could also be used as a graph database.

Yes, on the queries that I've done (mostly friendship graphs, and doing queries like getting friends of friends) postgres was pretty much on par with neo4j. I'm way more familiar with tuning postgres though, so there's that.

I really liked the cypher query language of neo4j, it was super easy to learn and is way simpler to express complex traversals across a graph. Writing a query in postgres to traverse a graph isn't as straightforward, and unless you're doing it often will take a long time to get used to.

i wasnt expecting that answer...

how large was your friends table? maybe it was quick when doing friends of friends because the friends table was already wholly loaded into memory?

i wonder if your relationship traversals spanned across different tables, if postgres would still be as quick?

wtf. i had no idea this could be done to open source code.

I'm not going to comment on the validity of this specific case, but "open source" doesn't automatically mean "protected from copyright law infringement".

From what I understand, companies _have_ to do stuff like this. By not protecting a copyright or trademark you are, in effect, giving it up.

Calling your API "node.whatsapp" is using their trademark, and they do have the right and responsibility to protect it.

It doesn't make them wrong; just a jerk :)

They have to do it to protect trademark, but not copyright. I'm not sure there's any real copyright claim to be made here. The DMCA does have provisions against reverse engineering etc. It's not clear to me from this notice exactly what's believed to be infringing other than the Trademark claim, which is pretty straightforward (and easily gotten around).

> The DMCA does have provisions against reverse engineering

Here in the EU reverse engineering is allowed and even if you sign a contract saying you won't reverse engineer something you've still got the right to do it.

How would the DMCA comply with this, would anyone be able to shut down legally reverse engineered code on GitHub?

GitHub is located and hosted in the US, so US rules apply when it comes to takedowns, etc.

I always wondered, if a company doesn't really want to protect their trademark (too much hassle), but has to, can't they just grant people a (temporary, revokable) right to use the trademark pro forma?

I remember seeing a company (something Linux-related) that had a very strict trademark policy, and they did sue people who used their logo or their name, or event something different but similar. But their web site had a form where you could just enter your email address and name, and it would say oki-doki, you may now use our trademark as you like, until we say otherwise.

You could do that, but probably not in WhatsApp's case, assuming that aggressive trademark protection was a condition of the acquisition deal.

github.com/karabijavad/cadet

easy embedded neo4j, via jruby!