

Show HN: Game of Angels – A force-directed graph showing key VCs interactions - cam_pj
http://gameofangels.com/

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UserRights
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?

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cam_pj
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
too late, but if you are still watching this thread, take a look at
[http://littlesis.org/oligrapher](http://littlesis.org/oligrapher)

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cam_pj
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?

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UserRights
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.

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gearhart
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
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
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#linkDistanc...](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-
Layout#linkDistance)

~~~
cam_pj
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-s...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9901565/charge-based-on-
size-d3-force-layout)

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).

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shaneleonard121
Really great idea. Thanks a mil.

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honksillet
What is the dataset for this?

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

