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abiczoon Ask HN: Could you please suggest a service for reviewing English texts on site?

I haven't used them yet, but this is what I found sometime ago when I was looking for something similar: http://www.wordy.com/

abiczoon AskHN: NoSQL with full text search - which is better CouchDB or MongoDB?

The syncing is done on the app level: when a new document is inserted into the db that needs to be indexed a background job is launched that insert the document in Solr. This shouldn't be too hard manage if you can write post-save handlers in your model code.

The average document is about 1KB and has about 30 attributes (but only 2-3 of those attributes needs to be index).

abiczoon AskHN: NoSQL with full text search - which is better CouchDB or MongoDB?

I wouldn't rule out using a separate search engine. Yes, you'll probably have to keep the index in sync with the db manually but I found that it also gives you much more flexibility.

I personally use Solr with MongoDB and it works pretty well. Keeping the index in sync is not that big of a deal for me (depends on the application of course) and in exchange I get a full featured FTS engine that is probably more mature and has more features than an integrated one would have.

abiczoon Ask HN: Simple little business - what should I call it?

I might be interested in such a service, but I can't find your contact information. Could you provide an email address or drop me a line: abiczo at gmail com Thanks.

abiczoon Ask HN: How to split equity

Since you are in the early stages, go with 1/3 each, anything else will potentially cause a lot of headaches down the road.

Having equal equity creates a healthy environment where everyone feels that they should put in as much work as they can. If the others have less equity than you, they probably won't be as motivated as you are. And even if they were, you'll likely start to question whether they are working hard enough, whether they really want the company to succeed etc. This will cause a lot of unnecessary tension.

So I think you should bite the bullet, give up some equity in exchange for better odds of succeeding.

Also, some kind of vesting may be a good idea if you don't trust you cofounders enough yet.

(I was in a somewhat similar situation like you about a year ago, went with 1/3 each and I'm still very happy with that decision.)

abiczoon Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?

What about the little 'favourite star'? Surely that achieves the exact same thing ultimately?

The favorite button in it's current form is more like a bookmark button in my opinion. What's missing is that can't see who favorited a tweet.

In our (web-based) client we implemented this missing funcionality, renamed the button to "Like" and it works pretty well, it's being used a lot.

I think, but I can't remember for sure, that the number of times a tweet has been favourited is returned by the api, so clients could show it if they wanted.

No, it's not returned unfortunately.

abiczoon Ask HN: When to buy vs rent servers?

So for $150-$300 upfront and $60-$100 monthly, you can have a capable server hosted at a good facility at a much cheaper cost than the equivalent "rented" server.

If you're OK with the servers being hosted in Germany, you can rent a quite powerful dedicated server from http://hetzner.de for roughly the same amount of money.

Look for the EQ4-10 servers (http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...)

I've been with them for almost a year now and I can only recommend them.

abiczoon Ask HN: What Python web programming frameworks and tools are you using?

Webob + a few WSGI middleware libraries, Mako, MongoDB, mod_wsgi (Apache), Varnish

I'll probably try Flask for my next project.

abiczoon Twitter Removes “via {client}” Attribution in #newTwitter. Buh-Bye Developers

It's hard to tell since Twitter is not releasing any meaningful statistics about this.

A couple of weeks ago they released a graph suggesting that 78% of all users use twitter.com (http://blog.twitter.com/2010/09/evolving-ecosystem.html)

If you look carefully, they explain that this 78% is the percentage of people that have logged into twitter.com at least once in the last 30 days. Unfortunately this is not very useful since there are a multiple things that can only be done on twitter.com and not in 3rd party clients, either because the functionality is missing from the API or is broken (they started to fix some of these though). So even if people use a 3rd party client most of the time, they would still log into twitter.com every once in a while and thus will be counted as a twitter.com user.

A more useful statistics would be the percentage of users who use any given client as their main way of interacting with Twitter. Of course twitter.com would still be the biggest client, but not with 78% of all users, more likely somewhere between 40-50% (based on stats by twittersource.info, tdash.org and stats of Hungarian users I've collected).

As for the original post, we're running a web-based client and twitter.com is one of the most important referers so I'll have to agree that removing the "via client" attribution will hurt developers in a big way. (Yeah, I know, they are not removing it just making it a lot less prominent)

abiczoon Ask HN: How to monetize 5 million+ pageview Twitter widget?

That's forbidden by the Twitter API TOS. See http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms Section IV.2.

abiczoon Ask HN: Whats the best way to find a H-1B job in the Bay Area?

From what I heard there are quite a few startups that are willing to sponspor an H-1B for the right candidate. You might want to look for those that have received some funding, but other than that just look for startups that you'd like to work for and ask them whether they're willing to sponsor an H-1B.

abiczoon HN Contractors: Add Yourself

My guess is: http://wordle.net