« BackShow HN: Map of YC Startupsyc-map.vercel.appSubmitted by yoouareperfect 21 hours ago
  • paxys 3 hours ago

    There's no need to include an X & Y axis, labels and gridlines if they all have no meaning. A simple cluster diagram is enough.

    • ascorbic an hour ago

      I agree it would be less confusing if they weren't there. I'm sure I'm not alone in spending some time trying to work out what the axes were.

    • Liftyee 18 hours ago

      Cool project, but missed opportunity to name the arbitrary dimensions Y and C...

      • lovestory 14 hours ago

        My dumb ass was trying to figure out what each dimension meant

        • tptacek 14 hours ago

          That doesn't make you dumb; there is no intuitive meaning for the axes chosen; you can think of them, roughly, as statistically chosen to maximize clustering.

          • bravura an hour ago

            Statistically chosen to maximize *some particular loss measure, which in this case might be the t-SNE or UMAP criterion, and is computed only globally and not for different filters.

            • tptacek 14 minutes ago

              Right (I mean, I'm saying "right" but really I should just say "I'm taking your word for it"), but even more fundamentally this is dimensionality reduction from an OpenAI embedding vector, which seems almost like the asymptotic limit of inscrutability.

          • alex-knyaz 13 hours ago

            same

          • Bilal_io 16 hours ago

            OP made the change

            • yoouareperfect 16 hours ago

              haha awesome, shipped!

              • ProofHouse an hour ago

                I figure why not plot them with an X and Y (Y,C) of some sort

            • rl_for_energy 13 hours ago

              It’d be nice to just see the name of the company on click instead of going to the website (I’m on mobile). Trying to find our company

              • mring33621 an hour ago

                i'd like a filter by target market (US, EU, APAC...)

                • yoouareperfect 38 minutes ago

                  Coming for v2

                • k-i-r-t-h-i 2 hours ago

                  This is awesome! Are you able to also add F24?

                  • woodylondon 6 hours ago

                    Really nice to see - also, It would be great when filtering if there was a tabular view at the bottom as well.

                    • kure256 10 hours ago

                      Love that, what are Axes Y and C?

                      • DrawTR 9 hours ago

                        Apparently inspired by a comment on this very post! (Above yours, right now.)

                        > Cool project, but missed opportunity to name the arbitrary dimensions Y and C...

                      • rrr_oh_man 20 hours ago

                        Cool concept! What are the X and Y axes?

                        Oh, and your website has an unchanged Wordpress favicon...

                        • tptacek 18 hours ago

                          They're semi-arbitrary, dimensionally reduced from OpenAI embedding vectors.

                        • tmshapland 18 hours ago

                          Really neat! We were Tule, in the industrials part of the map in grey.

                          There's something wonky when I zoom in on Chrome on my laptop. It abruptly shifts to another part of the map.

                          • welder 11 hours ago
                            • jb1991 17 hours ago

                              Filters are unreadable on mobile.

                              • yoouareperfect 16 hours ago

                                should be fixed now, thanks!

                              • welder 11 hours ago

                                Company status isn't up to date... I know there's more than 1 public company that went through YC.

                                • yoouareperfect 8 hours ago

                                  Check the filters, not all batches are selected as default. Only the latest ones. If you select all of them, then there are many public companies

                                • zild3d 10 hours ago

                                  fun, though I also got stuck on what the Y and C axes represent initially. IMO just hide the axes altogether, since the goal is just some visual clustering/similarity

                                  • skeeter2020 4 hours ago

                                    Maybe I'm slow, but clustering on what dimension? The lack of axes and labeling makes it pretty confusing to me, but I'm a dinosaur.

                                    Visuals that are not self-explanatory make me feel dumb.

                                    • gavmor an hour ago

                                      We don't know what to label those features/dimensions, because they're a reduction form higher dimensions that we also didn't bother to interrogate.

                                      It's possible to figure them out. I wish OP would.

                                      • yoouareperfect an hour ago

                                        OP here, Is there a way to figure that out?

                                        • gavmor 30 minutes ago

                                          (Not OP) I can think of a convoluted and expensive pair-wise comparison method, but I hope there's also a way to figure this out during the application of principal component analysis in a way I don't understand.

                                          Edit: I'm thinking it can't be done without experimentation on the embedding model.

                                          Edit2: Ah, even that might not yield results, because as the basis is derived interstitially through computation, there's no guarantee the features of the final coordinate system will have any accessible relationship to those of the initial basis.

                                  • gniting 10 hours ago

                                    Nice! What's the tech stack?

                                    • yoouareperfect 9 hours ago

                                      For scraping and all the processing, typescript. Embeddings: openai

                                      For visualizing react (nextjs) + plotly (though the lack of mobile zoom makes me question if I should chsnge it)

                                    • uncomplexity_ 19 hours ago

                                      hella nice mate very interesting

                                      what's the x and y axes?

                                      • jerrygenser 19 hours ago

                                        they don't have meaning by themselves. they are two dimensions that umap projected the original embeddings down to in order to show a combination of local neighborhood similarity or closenes

                                        • gavmor an hour ago

                                          Well, they do have meaning by themselves, but it's more work to figure that out. All regular, predictable relationships "have" meaning because all meaning is prescribed. And since we've captured many such prescriptions in LLMs, they can do a decent job approximating those.

                                      • ksec 6 hours ago

                                        I didn't know YC does Government, Healthcare, Industrials, Real Estate and Construction. All these are great sectors and never made the headline.