Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta • Hacker News Board

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#41

Post by leehro » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:23 PM UTC

twog wrote: post #38

stared wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, are you going to provide built-in things like: IPython viewer (like http://nbviewer.ipython.org/ ), LaTeX viewer for notes (like http://mathb.in/ ), support for slides (this thing would be awesome - to have possibility to view them and view/fork their source; a bit related to http://slidewiki.org/ ) or something in that line?

We have similar ideas for integrations with those tools, with the exception of latex. With latex, we have our own online editor with some neat git integration.

Do you have any examples of these online? Today, I don't see any reason I would use this over GitHub.

I gather that your Mac app may be simpler, but it's not available yet.

Since I don't already have dozens of projects on banyan, it's hard to see the value.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to link to some repos with examples of the fancy LaTeX or IPython formatting

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#42

Post by raffenet » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:27 PM UTC

sciencerobot wrote: post #39

raffenet wrote: post #27

it looks like this just runs a local gitlab instance on your mac. how do you share with other users?

There is a central GitLab server.

So the blog post claims improvements to the webapp were made and has an image of the gitlab interface. Gitlab was recently updated and made big changes in the backend to improve performance.

This smells fishy.

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#43

Post by xroja » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:31 PM UTC

Have you thought about easing distributed collaboration for structured data? The use case I'm thinking of is multiple groups submitting data to one central informatics/analysis group (i.e. consortia, meta-analyses). Scientists still throw around data in excel sheets with ever-increasing versioning through file names (e.g., gene.data.v29.201230429.janes.final.Final.reallyFinal.xls). It's a huge time-suck that doesn't help anybody. Support for easy viewing of XML, JSON, or even some sort of hosted RDBMS would be incredible.

I think it's great to target the wider, non-developer audience. They could benefit immensely from version control, distributed systems, and smart editing tools. It could be a big benefit to the whole scientific community.

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#44

Post by twog » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:40 PM UTC

irollboozers wrote: post #35

Congrats, this looks great! Some of the buttons are a little off ( http://i.imgur.com/9CRvFQj.png ) Mac OS X, Chrome 26.0.1410.65. I'm very excited to tell people that github for science is now a thing. I'll be signing up for sure.

Thanks! Just submitted a fix for this. We will push this into production when things slow down on HN a little bit

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#45

Post by cing » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:43 PM UTC

Great to see another product in this space (https://www.scigit.com/ launched not too long ago). As far as writing papers, my old-fashioned P.I. will probably never budge from Microsoft Word, so Google Docs is the best solution at the moment. The fact that they have "Google Scholar" integration for inserting citations into the editor makes it pretty much a no brainer for writing a draft.

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#46

Post by twog » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:43 PM UTC

raffenet wrote: post #42

sciencerobot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a central GitLab server.

So the blog post claims improvements to the webapp were made and has an image of the gitlab interface. Gitlab was recently updated and made big changes in the backend to improve performance. This smells fishy.

Hi raffenet,

We have used gitlab components & also contributed back to gitlab. Its a great project, but I can assure you we have an entirely different product. Were just leveraging OSS projects like any other startup

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#47

Post by irollboozers » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:45 PM UTC

twog wrote: post #44

irollboozers wrote: post #35

Congrats, this looks great! Some of the buttons are a little off ( http://i.imgur.com/9CRvFQj.png ) Mac OS X, Chrome 26.0.1410.65. I'm very excited to tell people that github for science is now a thing. I'll be signing up for sure.

Thanks! Just submitted a fix for this. We will push this into production when things slow down on HN a little bit

No problem, the firehose that is HN is definitely exciting. Hope you guys are getting good traffic :)

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#48

Post by twog » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:45 PM UTC

cing wrote: post #45

Great to see another product in this space ( https://www.scigit.com/ launched not too long ago). As far as writing papers, my old-fashioned P.I. will probably never budge from Microsoft Word, so Google Docs is the best solution at the moment. The fact that they have "Google Scholar" integration for inserting citations into the editor makes it pretty much a no brainer for writing a draft.

Thanks for pointing out scigit, Im a big fan of what they are doing. We dont support Word yet, but I do recognize that older P.I. / professors wont leave Word easily/ever. We have some solutions on the way for that.

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#49

Post by twog » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

xroja wrote: post #43

Have you thought about easing distributed collaboration for structured data? The use case I'm thinking of is multiple groups submitting data to one central informatics/analysis group (i.e. consortia, meta-analyses). Scientists still throw around data in excel sheets with ever-increasing versioning through file names (e.g., gene.data.v29.201230429.janes.final.Final.reallyFinal.xls). It's a huge time-suck that doesn't…

Im really interested in this but have some questions I would like to ask you. Do you mind dropping me an email at toni (at) banyan.co?

Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta

#50

Post by gehar » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 6:11 PM UTC

twog wrote: post #48

cing wrote: post #45

Great to see another product in this space ( https://www.scigit.com/ launched not too long ago). As far as writing papers, my old-fashioned P.I. will probably never budge from Microsoft Word, so Google Docs is the best solution at the moment. The fact that they have "Google Scholar" integration for inserting citations into the editor makes it pretty much a no brainer for writing a draft.

Thanks for pointing out scigit, Im a big fan of what they are doing. We dont support Word yet, but I do recognize that older P.I. / professors wont leave Word easily/ever. We have some solutions on the way for that.

The easiest solution is to wait 10 years.