Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture | Hacker News Reader

Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

paulstamatiou.com

101 pointsPStamatiou45 comments

Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here?

My inspiration for this was The Setup (http://usesthis.com/), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

Definitely, this is excellent. Like the way it's got a bit of tech stuff and also business as well.

Well done Stammy, this was excellent. It's like the way I wanted Founders At Work to never end and keep reading more about company's from the inside, rather than the "success theater" at presentations and talks.

It's so good I might just steal the format :)

Love these posts, please keep them coming!

Very interesting post. One thing that would be interesting to know about startups which gets talked about very little is the mundane things about running such a shop.

- None of the startups have HR. How do they deal with Health and other benefits? - Legal etc.

Love the sawhorse desks.

Your webpage layout sucks: in a Browser half a window wide (Opera 11.61, 64-bit Win7, 1680x1050 resolution), the text overflows past the right margin. When I scroll it horizontally, the blue block of text ("Paul Stamatiou") and the purple ad overlap the text. This (1st line of text) is where I stopped reading.

Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.

Remove "position: fixed;" from "div.left-col" in responsive-stammy.css

Unless there was a reason to break the (horizontal) scrolling.

I think he meant horizontal scrolling (which is because his browser window is only 800px wide).

position fixed on the left sidebar was actually requested by many folks so they dont have to scroll all the way back up after reading a long article of mind to get to the nav

I'm impolite because I'm annoyed and I'm annoyed because browsers by default automatically adapt text layout to the window size, and you have somehow purposefully broken this mechanism. Victory of design over functionality.

What's more, YOU are now asking ME to inconvenience myself in order to fix YOUR bug. Sorry, no-go.

[Your page is not the only one offender, but you're the first author I have the opportunity to tell this to directly.]

"browsers by default automatically adapt text layout to the window size"

That is not a browser default. That is fluid vs fixed. Check out smashing magazine for some articles on how that works in HTML/CSS if you're curious.

"fix YOUR bug"

Me not wanting to support people with 800px wide browsers is not a bug. It's a decision. Much like major companies no longer want to support IE users.

> That is not a browser default. That is fluid vs fixed.

Nitpicking. Fluid is default unless you change it. Fixed layouts belong to fixed media, such as PDFs formatted for a particular paper size. [with them I have no problem, and, incidentally. I have yet to run into a PDF that is not viewable in a window 800 pixels wide.]

> Me not wanting to support people with 800px wide browsers is not a bug.

In the same way that Excel 2003 having 64k row limit is not a "bug", but it's still unusable if you have a larger dataset. (From what I've seen on the net, newer versions support up to 1M rows; but the fundamental problem - arbitrary limitation - is still there.)

I really wonder how you would have replied had I written that I tried to read it on my phone or a tablet.

> I really wonder how you would have replied had I written that I tried to read it on my phone or a tablet.

I use media-queries. It looks different on iPhone for example

What are typical working hours? Can engineers work from home?

Jason: 8-10 hours in office, more from home / weekends. Yes if needed but we prefer to collaborate in the office. Since we run continuous deployment speed matters, and that means you need high intra-office bandwidth.

If the bit about intra office bandwidth isn't ridiculous misdirection, then apologies... But it sure sounds like it. I think it's interesting, in an age where shops are bending over backward to rethink what makes people productive, and go above and beyond when it comes to equipment (or tequila), that telecommuting still seems to have an unfounded shroud of taboo hanging over it.

What am I missing? Please feel free to tell me why intra-office bandwidth is a really important attribute that deserves a place in the answer to this question.

(For the record Votizen seems rad, and the article is awesome. Sorry for coming off negative)

Devs use IRC, even in the office. And we do standups with some members on Skype. But meatspace still matters.

We generally prefer people in the office, all other things being equal. All other things are generally not equal, but it's a complex set of factors.

I worked as a contractor with several clients for about a year, almost all remotely from my home office. It works, but it is definitely still good to be in person.

I was able to do that because of market imbalances - I was, for some value of "better", the best available option, despite being remote. And that is certainly still true for some future employees. There's also the difficulty, when you're mostly central, that the off-site people are somehow less real or feel less ownership.

I wanted to relocate before I knew I'd be joining Votizen. It was a happy accident.

I do think, at some point, if the startup funding ramp continues, that it will just become absurd to try to pack in all the people moving here. And, of course, the world is a big place and there are more smart people living elsewhere than living here. But the density of skills and funding does matter, too.

More conjecture. I feel like the honest answer to this question would be closer to:

"We've been lucky enough to find smart people who are happy to come into the office so this isn't a bridge we've needed to cross, which we're happy about because we don't really have much idea how it would impact our company or what challenges it might introduce"

It's unfortunate that the idea of remote employees is perpetrated as a compromise (we couldn't find anyone better, closer). So many of us literally make tools that throw rocks at the problem of erasing physical space (including you). I find constant inspiration in remote working that gets fed into the tools I build, and that's far from the only benefit. I'm not arguing that it's better, I'm arguing that it's not worse.. and if anything, is likely a rounding error in the equation of who the best person for your company is.

Also, all other things are never equal.

Honestly, we've been close to hiring 2 remote people in our short time. Both were because we knew how good the people were. Hiring with confidence is difficult, and canning a person shortly after you realize you made a hiring mistake is a bad outcome for both parties.

Hiring remotely makes this harder.

(Personal opinion, not my employer, yadayada but:

I've long thought that the best way to hire eng would be to have a pool of contractors, all "maybe interested in FT" in both directions of the transaction. Hire the best of the pool who are willing once you have confidence gained. Remote would be one factor to overcome in gaining confidence.

Even so, there are structural problems with this; it's hard to take that course in hiring as the first-mover. People don't like to quit jobs - even in this awesome job market for devs - without a bird in the hand.)

Collaboration is hard. It's harder when you're not in the same room. You can bend over backwards to try to make remote collaboration productive, but the state-of-the-art is nowhere near as good as being in the same room, at least for some kinds of collaboration.

Votizen is an early-stage startup still trying to develop its own company culture.

If you have a bunch of remote employees, it's not going to be easy.

Basically, it's nice to walk over to someone's desk and chat.

> David: One state had its voter file arrive on a magnetic tape format called 128 CPI — characters per inch of magnetic tape (same format that was used by UNIVAC in 1951) — which is probably how Auric Goldfinger stored his data. Converting it to something useable was more expensive than acquiring the tape itself.

That's amazing. I wonder which state it was.

Anyone else find it odd that Votizen wants you to share your political views with your social network friends? Political views, for me at least, have always been an inherently private subject matter. Sure, I have my friends who I'll talk politics with, but I don't espouse candidates on my Facebook profile.

I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-an...

Hi, I'm a dev at Votizen.

I haven't read that study yet - it's on my list - but I tend to agree that existing social ties are somewhat orthogonal to political views. We are surprised by our friends' views precisely because we don't feel comfortable discussing things. This limits communication and understanding. The two-party winner-take-all system, combined with slow feedback loops (I won't vote for Pelosi because she supported warrantless wiretaps, but she doesn't know that and therefore doesn't care about it) mean that the messaging for campaigns to succeed depends on wedge issues and vilification.

At the same time, our social connections (be they online or off) do inform our positions and views on ranges of acceptable behavior. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window and http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends-...

Connectedness in a network increases the transitivity of ideas. Now what we need is a forum/channel/model for expressing our political positions/desires/demands and we should see the political process get less hierarchical, more responsive, and more accountable.

So yes, "please vote for my candidate" via online channels is v0 of the overall goal. We want to flip it, "take my position if you want my vote", but to get there, we need campaigns to recognize the influence of their electorate that social networks (again, online or offline) provide.

Don't you think your efforts will just be co-opted though?

I've got a number of friends on social networks who don't hesitate to share their political views now. The problem is that they're doing so by whatever divide-and-conquer meme the political masters are spinning this week. It's the same as it ever was, only faster and 10x as annoying. I've actually hidden a couple of people on my FB timeline because of it.

What do you think will make it possible for your efforts to avoid being co-opted into more of the same old trap?

It's a risk, but it's one we recognize. We're in this to disrupt hierarchy and broadcast-as-politics. I think that peer re-broadcasting is basically incompatible with the spirit of the interaction. The medium is the message, and the message is formed by the medium.

I don't think you can successfully run a broadcast system on top of the peer-based medium. The transition may be slow[1] and painful[2], but the change is economic (in terms of transactional overhead and diminishing returns); it's hard to see how it could be avoided short of censorship and regime[3].

If these peers are just spouting the message (the easiest thing for them to do - RT "yeah!") that will not be persuasive. The angels don't need to be saved.

What's new here is that collaborating on issues can span time and space; group-forming doesn't need a reason before it can happen. The reason can be discovered.

[1] http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100284

[2] http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4517

[3] http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and...

We don't need you to, but ultimately if we want to change this political system, meaning replace the fundraise from large donors > buy television / direct mail > blast you with TV/robocall with something more democratic, you're going to need to be a bit more vocal about what you want from your elected officials, and prove somewhere that you're a voter and you matter.

Our long term vision is to build online electorates, where you come together with people that share your values, and attract candidates to a large voting pool. In a system like that, candidates even with little to no money, can win based on how well they can convince you / match with your values.

Happy to go into further detail!

They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people.

Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.

I'm a developer at Votizen.

Just our voter history (whether a voter actually voted in a particular election) is, on average, 10 rows per voter record. 200 million voter records * 10 history records per voter = ~2 billion rows.

Ah, okay. That makes more sense. Thanks.

It's about ~200M voters (United States only)

I'm guessing that their database isn't voter registrations but individual votes--one person can have multiple votes and registrations recorded over the years.

I still don't see how that could add up to a factor of 10, though. I'm in a similar space and typically people will have fewer than that, although the voter records we have don't go back more than a decade or so.

A ~10 year record could mean ~30 chances to vote, but hardly anyone votes in a majority of those elections. I, too, am curious how they have an average of 10 votes per voter.

I just looked at a rough count - it's 1.1B voter history records. I don't have an offline copy to do heavier analytics on it - just from analyze stats on indexes for now.

Also, after signing up, people can correct/revise their voting records:

http://imgur.com/a/NOj4I

This is because 1) the states themselves don't keep complete records and 2) we don't have all voting history forever, as scarmig pointed out.

scarmig, you're "in the space" I googled and this was 1st: http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/scarmig/scarmig1.html What do you work on?

Sideline, is that related to Lessig's Root Strikers? Seems to be a different Libertarian site w/ unfortunate brand collision. :-/

That's not me, though I'm quite sympathetic to the libertarian critique, particularly the public choice side of things. Otherwise garden-variety left =)

As far as where in the "space" I am, it's a fairly well-established player, though I've been thinking of moving on recently. Just out of curiosity, how much a requirement is Python over there? Was thinking of dropping off a resume...

We're fairly invested in python at this point, but I think smart devs are professional learners. We have a great dev on staff, Emily, who came from Rails and has been immediately productive.

We're definitely not "full stack python" - best tool for the job, etc.

I've been legal to vote for 17 years, and I've voted in every election since I became legal. That's about twice a year for 17 years (odd years sometimes only have one), so I probably have around 30ish voting records.

A 1.7 ratio is totally believable. I've worked with voter databases that suggested higher average ratios, but I'm not sure if that's because the voters have all those options to vote or because it's an artifact of the data model.

Example: http://www.smartvoter.org/2012/01/17/ca/la/

This shows 14 election days happening in 2011 for LA County. But many of those are limited to a particular city or congressional district. I think when the data gets recorded at the state level, some expediencies cause the "available election" count to be distorted.

I haven't used Votizen but in other voting records databases, they record "Yes" or "No" as to whether they voted (and sometimes other information depending on the state).

I really dig posts like this. As an engineer, this is the kind of stuff that makes a startup a really attractive place to work.

Thanks! We are hiring! https://github.com/votizen/careers

So question 1, what do they do exactly? I can't quite parse it out from the article. Can someone who doesn't use facebook frequently still use this?

We can scan your social networks for registered voters you know. Once you know who they are, you can affect their vote by asking them to turn out for who you want. I think the discovery piece is very interesting, even if you're not ready to ask anyone to help you elect a candidate yet. We'll be building more uses in the future.

Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?

Sort of. You have to pay a nominal fee for it and sign some documents indicating that you have a legitimate (political) use for them and won't use them for commercial marketing, etc.

The repercussions for misusing this data are pretty severe. This isn't a slap on the wrist, and we take securing that data seriously.

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