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Show HN: Game of Angels – A force-directed graph showing key VCs interactions

23 points by cam_pj 11y ago

shaneleonard121 11y ago
Really great idea. Thanks a mil.
gearhart 11y ago
Interesting concept. I love the connection information you can draw from Twitter, I wonder how closely it correlates to actual outbound/inbound influence. From a purely visual (and probably pedantic) perspective, if you turn off d3's "gravity" you'll get a (marginally) more representative picture because the only forces acting on the nodes will be the links, and you don't need to worry about things floating off because you've already got one fixed point attached to all other nodes.
- cam_pj 11y ago
  Thanks. I think it's definitely amazing to see how "inter-connected" (for the lack of a better word) this community of investors (especially in Silicon Valley) is. On your second point: thing is - could be because I am not a d3 expert - when I turn off gravity, I am struggling to keep nodes within the canvas. Maybe I am missing another setting?
  - gearhart 11y ago
    I've never played with minified d3 code before, it's kinda fun having to use just the api without being able to inspect the code :) Looks like your linkDistance is fixed at 20 (the default) and your linkStrength is dependent on connection strength? I think the canonical approach (as in, the one mbostock was thinking of, although I don't think it's made explicit anywhere, possibly deliberately) would be to have the linkStrength be fixed and the linkDistance be a function of the closeness of the connections (which I just referred to as "link strength" in my head, ugghh.) possibly with a correcting factor to accommodate for the size of the screen. On a side note, this is one of the major troubles we've had with d3, in that a lot of it was obviously made with a particular use case in mind, but built to be much more flexible/powerful than necessary for that use case, which is the great strength of the library, but means that whilst the documentation of the api is extremely thorough, the documentation of the natural ways to use it tends to be done exclusively by example, which doesn't quite convey the understanding that lies behind it. Ref: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-Layout#linkDistance https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-Layout#linkDistanc...
    - cam_pj 11y ago
      Ah. You are exactly right... Thank you! I guess I got confused with the "link strength" terminology. I need to change this then. Re. gravity: I was using this answer from mbostock to try and control the size of the graph. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9901565/charge-based-on-size-d3-force-layout http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9901565/charge-based-on-s... But I have found it quite difficult to be honest, especially when you need to accommodate both desktop and mobile (I ended up using two sets of params).
UserRights 11y ago
This reminds me of http://theyrule.net/ http://theyrule.net/ - it is a quite old website, still flash. It would be good to have an open format definition and an open source web frontend for visualizations like this. The connections of your pet investor might be interesting, but there is much more potential to this if you would ask the people that did theyrule for their data, maybe you can find a way of working together?
- cam_pj 11y ago
  Thanks! I did not know theyrule. Very interesting. CB Insights (someone just sent me the link: https://www.cbinsights.com/business-social-network https://www.cbinsights.com/business-social-network) also have quite a few data points as well.
  - UserRights 11y ago
    too late, but if you are still watching this thread, take a look at http://littlesis.org/oligrapher http://littlesis.org/oligrapher
    - cam_pj 11y ago
      This is super impressive actually. It seems US centric so I had never seen this work, but wow, there is a lot of stuff. Do you know if journos use this?
      - UserRights 11y ago
        No, sorry, I do not know. It would be nice to have some kind of standard format for these kind of info so a visualization like yours could be applied easily to different databases. Maybe with some API-mangling (like yahoo pipes) it would be possible to consume several data sources and feed them into your js. Just an idea.
honksillet 11y ago
What is the dataset for this?
- cam_pj 11y ago
  I use the Angel List API to get a list of investors. Then the Twitter API to analyse their timelines etc.

23 points by cam_pj 11y ago

Really great idea. Thanks a mil.

Interesting concept. I love the connection information you can draw from Twitter, I wonder how closely it correlates to actual outbound/inbound influence. From a purely visual (and probably pedantic) perspective, if you turn off d3's "gravity" you'll get a (marginally) more representative picture because the only forces acting on the nodes will be the links, and you don't need to worry about things floating off because you've already got one fixed point attached to all other nodes.

cam_pj 11y ago
Thanks. I think it's definitely amazing to see how "inter-connected" (for the lack of a better word) this community of investors (especially in Silicon Valley) is. On your second point: thing is - could be because I am not a d3 expert - when I turn off gravity, I am struggling to keep nodes within the canvas. Maybe I am missing another setting?
- gearhart 11y ago
  I've never played with minified d3 code before, it's kinda fun having to use just the api without being able to inspect the code :) Looks like your linkDistance is fixed at 20 (the default) and your linkStrength is dependent on connection strength? I think the canonical approach (as in, the one mbostock was thinking of, although I don't think it's made explicit anywhere, possibly deliberately) would be to have the linkStrength be fixed and the linkDistance be a function of the closeness of the connections (which I just referred to as "link strength" in my head, ugghh.) possibly with a correcting factor to accommodate for the size of the screen. On a side note, this is one of the major troubles we've had with d3, in that a lot of it was obviously made with a particular use case in mind, but built to be much more flexible/powerful than necessary for that use case, which is the great strength of the library, but means that whilst the documentation of the api is extremely thorough, the documentation of the natural ways to use it tends to be done exclusively by example, which doesn't quite convey the understanding that lies behind it. Ref: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-Layout#linkDistance https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-Layout#linkDistanc...
  - cam_pj 11y ago
    Ah. You are exactly right... Thank you! I guess I got confused with the "link strength" terminology. I need to change this then. Re. gravity: I was using this answer from mbostock to try and control the size of the graph. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9901565/charge-based-on-size-d3-force-layout http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9901565/charge-based-on-s... But I have found it quite difficult to be honest, especially when you need to accommodate both desktop and mobile (I ended up using two sets of params).

UserRights 11y ago

This reminds me of http://theyrule.net/ http://theyrule.net/ - it is a quite old website, still flash. It would be good to have an open format definition and an open source web frontend for visualizations like this. The connections of your pet investor might be interesting, but there is much more potential to this if you would ask the people that did theyrule for their data, maybe you can find a way of working together?

cam_pj 11y ago
Thanks! I did not know theyrule. Very interesting. CB Insights (someone just sent me the link: https://www.cbinsights.com/business-social-network https://www.cbinsights.com/business-social-network) also have quite a few data points as well.
- UserRights 11y ago
  too late, but if you are still watching this thread, take a look at http://littlesis.org/oligrapher http://littlesis.org/oligrapher
  - cam_pj 11y ago
    This is super impressive actually. It seems US centric so I had never seen this work, but wow, there is a lot of stuff. Do you know if journos use this?
    - UserRights 11y ago
      No, sorry, I do not know. It would be nice to have some kind of standard format for these kind of info so a visualization like yours could be applied easily to different databases. Maybe with some API-mangling (like yahoo pipes) it would be possible to consume several data sources and feed them into your js. Just an idea.

honksillet 11y ago

What is the dataset for this?

cam_pj 11y ago
I use the Angel List API to get a list of investors. Then the Twitter API to analyse their timelines etc.