Sorry the blog is down everyone! http://Banyan.co can provide a little more info while we scramble to get this back up!
Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
11–20 of 104 posts
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#12It's built on top of git?
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#13I don't know if you were inspired by a submission [1] I did almost six months ago, but if not, kudos anyway :) When the site is up again I will check it! [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712787
It wasnt! But we should talk. We are looking for engineers who want to change the way science works. We announced Banyan publicly last August [1] during the http://thegigtank.com [1] http://us-ignite.org/2012/08/gig-tank-demo-day-delivers/
Oh, I see, and I am checking the website right now. It something different from what I thought, but it is cool anyway. My email is on my profile :) Congratulations again!
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#14It's built on top of git?
Hi Maro, yes it is.
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#15Is there a way to make repository which is partly private?
For me it is a common use-case where some data aren't share for any reason (e.g. because they are not checked yet whether they are correct), while other files are public?
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#16This is a great idea!
I've been trying to collaborate my professor on academic papers with git. We tried my own git server, github, but they still seem to be too much trouble for people who do not use git regularly. Online LaTex editor integrated with the git service would be great! It would be better if you could add code highlight in the editor though. Also realtime PDF preview (maybe not realtime.. it'll be overwhelming for the server. A compile button?) would be awesome!
And for sure we need a separate community from Github just for academic publications. Mixing softwares and papers altogether is not a good idea. Banyan is really cool!
Congratulations on launching!
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#17Hi HN! We launched a private version of Banyan to a few of you here months ago. Since then, our team has been hard at work trying to make Banyan the future of open science. Todays launch is just the start. We know we have alot of work to do. Over the next few months we plan to tackle science, reproducibility, and make existing tools more awesome through our API. I want to be as transparent as possible. Im happy to an…
Hi twog, The blog appears to be down, but as an individual very interested in open science could you explain a bit more about the use-case Banyan targets? I imagine this is very focused on things like analysis or computational biology where the primary iterative factor is measured in lines of code changed. Do you see this tool being used by adjacent sciences? Life sciences, human subject research, materials?
Absolutely.
Our first target was initially bioinformatics, but we are moving into supporting all sciences. Our goal is to make sharing, collaborating & publishing research as simple as possible.
We are huge fans of git, and we want to leverage git to enhance every part of science. For us, that means integrations or improvements with existing tools like latex, ipython, etc.
I believe that open science hasnt taken off because there is no platform for it, no tool makes it easy/simple for the user, and the user isnt incentivized [1].
[1] Programmers apply for jobs now with their github/bitbucket profiles & there open source contributions. Why not provide scientists the same option?
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#18This is a great idea! I've been trying to collaborate my professor on academic papers with git. We tried my own git server, github, but they still seem to be too much trouble for people who do not use git regularly. Online LaTex editor integrated with the git service would be great! It would be better if you could add code highlight in the editor though. Also realtime PDF preview (maybe not realtime.. it'll be overwh…
Thanks songgao! Drop an email (mine is in my profile) and Ill get you signed up on our git-powered latex editor. It has most the features you just described, and is launching soon =)
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#19This is a great idea! I've been trying to collaborate my professor on academic papers with git. We tried my own git server, github, but they still seem to be too much trouble for people who do not use git regularly. Online LaTex editor integrated with the git service would be great! It would be better if you could add code highlight in the editor though. Also realtime PDF preview (maybe not realtime.. it'll be overwh…
Btw, LaTex compiler running in Native Client would be a potential solution to "realtime PDF preview". Not sure if it's a lot of work porting LaTex to NaCl though.
Re: Banyan, the "GitHub of Science", is now in public beta
#20I don't get it. I can't see any information on the homepage that makes it different from just using github.
Our main two differences from github is that we built banyan to be version control for "humans". Our mac application for example is extremely simple to use, and was designed with an 18 year old undergraduate/55 year old lab veteran in mind. Banyan was designed to be the middle ground of collaboration for users who know git with people who have no idea what git is (and in most cases, cant be bothered to learn another…
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?