"So why would this be interesting for HN readers?"

To show what you can do with AngularJS directives and that combining it with D3.js it can be quite powerful (even without source code). Anybody who worked with D3.js, should know how much boilerplate code needs to be written to have a visualisation. By abstracting that code in directives, it allows users to use out-of-the-box d3.js graphs. Someone could go ever further to implement an "interface" to customize these graphs through angularjs.

To anyone who's interested: I replied to another comment with a tutorial blog of how to create d3.js directives

Agh, read this after upvoting the article :(

You can always make your own d3 directives. Relevant "how-to" blog: http://briantford.com/blog/angular-d3.html

I'm the author of Radian. We're working on making it open source. If it comes down to it, I may just buy the IP back from the company I developed it for. It's to their benefit to have the thing open (more eyes). The only people who might lose out are the company's current start-up funders, but it's pretty clear that Radian doesn't actually have that much value as a closed source product.

Thanks for sharing this, looks really interesting.

Agreed, Angular and d3 are two of the most beautiful and useful pieces of JS out there. Radian's approach is very inspiring for the ones that use both of these awesome libraries.

But I find it too low level : I don't see the point of manipulating <dot> and <line> directives : is'nt it what SVG does already?

I'd rather use a <barchart> or a <piechart> directive.

If you're referring to the custom elements, Angular will also let you do things in a way that validates. Something like: <div data-plot="height=3, width=3"></div>