Jason Davies
jasondavies.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Jason Davies, a developer and data visualization specialist, builds interactive D3.js demos of maps, curves, algorithms and math patterns.
What HN saysHN links it for interactive demos like animated Bézier curves and map projections, which commenters describe as excellent work.
108HN people shared it
57linked it in comments
74stories submitted
3.1Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Animated Bézier Curves14 people · 477 points · first shared 2011 · 28 comments on HN
- 2Interactive Demo of Bloom Filters9 people · 238 points · first shared 2011 · 53 comments on HN
- 3Map Projection Transitions9 people · 203 points · first shared 2013 · 11 comments on HN
- 4World Airports Voronoi (2014)7 people · 777 points · first shared 2014 · 107 comments on HN
- 5Prime number patterns6 people · 489 points · first shared 2012 · 100 comments on HN
- 6Lots of Data visualisations using D3.js6 people · 7 points · first shared 2010 · 1 comments on HN
- 7Poisson-Disc Sampling6 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 8Random Points on a Sphere5 people · 128 points · first shared 2012 · 70 comments on HN
- 9World Capitals Voronoi5 people · 41 points · first shared 2019 · 4 comments on HN
- 10Planarity – Can you find the planar embedding?5 people · 14 points · first shared 2018 · 5 comments on HN
- 11Interactive Word Clouds in D3.js4 people · 44 points · first shared 2012 · 9 comments on HN
- 12Parallel Sets in D3.js4 people · 15 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 13Rotate the world3 people · 317 points · first shared 2013 · 71 comments on HN
- 14Traffic cellular automata exhibiting self-organisation [WebGL]3 people · 5 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 15Animated quasicrystals3 people · first shared 2011
What HN people wrote when they linked it
inflatableDodo · 2019-07-09
I hope I got you to look at a map. Maps are great. As a prize for admitting how bad you are at geography, here's a political map in Waterman's butterfly projection. - https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/waterman-butterfly/full.png
cscheid · 2016-05-08
Jason Davies has a really great interactive demo of Bezier curves: https://www.jasondavies.com/animated-bezier/
tomgp · 2015-04-30
Jason Davies has done excellent work on addressing this problem in the browser
https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/raster/
dllu · 2015-04-20
It's really cool that Poisson disc sampling is used to generate the points. Here, best-candidate sampling is used, based on [1]. But have you considered using the possibly faster Bridson's algorithm [2]?
Using Harris corners to analyze the picture is a cool idea too. Good job!
[1] http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/b17e0b2aa8b2d50de465
[2] https://www.jasondavies.com/poisson-disc/
rayshan · 2014-05-07
Perfect timing, just learning how to make a map in d3 for Bower stats [1]. Thought after experimenting with choropleth maps [2], bubbles on maps and dorling maps [3] [4], dorling maps appear to be the best way to show very dense info on relationships with vague references to geography.
[1] https://shan.io/bower/
[2] http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060606
[3] http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_publication_…
[4] http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/dorling-world/
gvalkov · 2012-07-21
I believe this site [1] is a great example of what you are saying (it was featured on hn earlier this week [2]). Firefox 14.1 performs really badly in comparison to Chromium 20.0 in this case.
[1]: http://www.jasondavies.com/primos/
[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4255738
mbostock · 2012-02-09
This is a truly impressive implementation, based on previous work by Jonathan Feinberg [1]. The display uses SVG, but the character outlines are computed by canvas bitmaps. Then, Jason implemented hierarchical bounding boxes to accelerate the intersection checks. Be sure to play with the draggable "0" and "1" letters beneath the demo!
Try clicking on words to navigate between word clouds. The cross-fade transition is beautiful, and words that overlap between clouds transform in their new position.
Non-English word clouds look amazing, too:
http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/#http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.twitter.com%…
[1] http://static.mrfeinberg.com/bv_ch03.pdf
jasondavies · 2011-12-02
Wow, this is amazing! Much more detailed than my own interactive Bézier curves demo:
http://www.jasondavies.com/animated-bezier/
agumonkey · 2014-10-03
His website, just in case http://www.jasondavies.com/
misiti3780 · 2014-05-14
Jason Davies also: https://www.jasondavies.com/
srean · 2026-08-02
Try interrupted sinusoidal, ot will be less edgy.
https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/interrupted-sinusoidal/
This is a beautiful site. Don't miss it if you haven't been there before
pithon · 2026-06-11
The framerate and latency on this visualization is absolute magic. Hover the mouse around over the sphere: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/
hermitcrab · 2026-06-08
I remember seeing something similar to https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/capitals/. But the areas were weighted by the populations of the capitals. You ended up with something quite close to real political maps IIRC.
mkl · 2025-08-24
It's common to want some minimum spacing between your random points, so they don't get clumped together, i.e. approximating uniform spacing rather than uniform probability distribution. For that, Poisson-disk sampling is good. See e.g. https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/random-points/, https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/bridson-siggraph07-poissondisk.pd… https://www.jasondavies.com/poisson-disc/.
lalaithion · 2024-06-03
In my opinion all maps of single airplane routes should be shown with a two-point equidistant projection. This clearly shows the straight line between the start and end as the shortest direction, and minimizes distortion along that line. Additionally, all points on the map have accurate distances from either point, and deviations from the geodesic (such as for administrative or weather related reasons) are easily seen.
https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/two-point-equidistant/
lavelganzu · 2024-04-23
It's difficult to visually distinguish GGV from the good ol' Mollweide Hemispheres projection (https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/mollweide-hemispheres/). As an added benefit, Mollweide projections are equal-area.
Y_Y · 2024-01-08
Many of you will be well aware that you can't have a distance-preserving "map", that is a projection from the globe to a segment to of the plane where the length of an arbitrary path is preserved. Hence you can't measure real-world distances using string and a paper map.
That said you can preserve distance in special cases, for example any two chosen points. For example you can go to https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/two-point-equidistant/ and put your points at the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope. While that still won't let you measure wiggly ship routes along the coast, it does a better job than Mercator.
Failing that you can use Gall-Peters which does a better job of conveying the vastness of Africa, since it's area preserving.
fragmede · 2024-01-02
For those that haven't played it, Planarity is a graph untangling game.
https://www.jasondavies.com/planarity/
nurple · 2023-10-22
Somewhat related: Something that helped me understand splines more intuitively was to see them animated in a way that they can be played with. https://www.jasondavies.com/animated-bezier/
amelius · 2023-08-12
Heh, found this game:
https://www.jasondavies.com/planarity/
zokier · 2023-03-21
And you can't talk about quasicrystals without mentioning this mesmerizing animation https://www.jasondavies.com/animated-quasicrystals/
For extra added fun, try blinking while looking at the animation
beaugunderson · 2022-05-26
and for those looking for a demonstration of an O(n) approach, Jason Davies' demo of Poisson Disk sampling is a good start and links to Bridson's algorithm: https://www.jasondavies.com/poisson-disc/
bnjmn · 2020-06-25
This isn't exactly what you asked for, but it seems pretty relevant to your stated interests: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/capitals/
edjrage · 2019-12-13
About the video:
https://www.jasondavies.com/collatz-graph/
One of the first results if you Google "collatz online". That's also probably why it's confusing - because it wasn't made for the article.
1wheel · 2019-10-10
Have you tried running simplifying the lines before rendering? Rendering 150k points is cool, but there aren't enough pixels to see that
level of detail.
https://www.jasondavies.com/simplify/
gwern · 2019-09-01
Poisson disc sampling! https://www.jasondavies.com/poisson-disc/
aidos · 2018-12-08
I always liked this interactive page to get an intuition.
https://www.jasondavies.com/animated-bezier/
tigerlily · 2018-10-17
Any implementation of the Poisson Disc Sampling algorithm. Really nice for evenly spacing out player starting locations on a world map :)
https://www.jasondavies.com/poisson-disc/
DanAndersen · 2018-08-04
Related: selecting points on the surface of a sphere https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/random-points/
Poisson disc sampling can be quite useful.
gowld · 2018-02-25