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.

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

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

Love the sawhorse desks.

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

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

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.]

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.

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

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)

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.

"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.

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.)

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

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

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

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.

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?

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...

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!

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.

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.

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.

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. :-/

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

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.