Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.banyan.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 104 posts

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

#61

Post by cing »

beambot wrote: post #57
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.

Yikes! What field are you in? For most STEM folks, TeX seems to be pretty standard. I'd really love to see a collaborative TeX editor (web based?). Better yet... a collaborative emacs!

I'm in biology. The journals Nature and Science both specify that Microsoft Word is their preferred format for submissions and I'd be surprised if lots of others still do. Collaborative online TeX editors have been featured on HN before (https://www.writelatex.com/, https://www.sharelatex.com/).

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

#62

Post by masonhensley »

twog wrote: post #2

Hi 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…

Congrats, I like seeing startups from Tennessee!

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

#63

Post by twog »

masonhensley wrote: post #62
twog wrote: post #2

Hi 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…

Congrats, I like seeing startups from Tennessee!

Hi Mason!

Thanks, there are more of us every day! Check out http://noogastartups.com I think Tennessee is the next great startup state.

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

#64

Post by Xcelerate »

twog wrote: post #63
masonhensley wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats, I like seeing startups from Tennessee!

Hi Mason! Thanks, there are more of us every day! Check out http://noogastartups.com I think Tennessee is the next great startup state.

Really? That's great to here. I'm a student at UT and do some research at Oak Ridge. I've always been interested in startups and would like to start my own at some point or join a small team.

Banyan looks great. I've been mentioning Github to my advisor, but I think this is much more suitable.

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

#65

Post by VLM »

twog wrote: post #17
tel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Our first target was initially bioinformatics"

Have you ever heard of the AAVSO? American Association of Variable Star Observers? It strikes me that you need a critical mass in the field you target and a small group to roll out. Bioinformatics sounds a little large. AAVSO sounds just about the right size. Of course your more detailed research will unsurprisingly have a different conclusion than mine, etc.

"I believe that open science hasnt taken off because there is no platform for it"

Well, the AAVSO has been around a lot longer than the web. Even if they're not eventually users, their experiences over the last century or so would make an interesting case study for you, one way or another.

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

#66

Post by VLM »

dfinninger wrote: post #40

This isn't a publishing platform, right? I'm all about free data, but if some "scientists" decide to "publish" their paper on your site it seems like that would totally evade peer-review. I know that is not your intention, but do you worry that some people my try to put out results that have not been fully tested/peer-reviewed? There are non-peer-reviewed journals (my mom finds them all the time...) out there, but a…

"some people"

Oh, just call a marketing guy a marketing guy.

I'll have to look into how it manages trust, for things like this.

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

#67

Post by VLM »

moyix wrote: post #59

Is there any way to create an anonymized link to a set of data and experimental results? Right now I'd love to use this, but all the conferences I submit to are double-blind, so there's no good way to let reviewers have access to my experimental data...

And, this is the other side of the trust coin. Who's data and is it the "real" data. (obviously I don't mean you personally but more like scientists generally)

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

#68

Post by Osmium »

Would love to try this but you'd have to let me have at least 1 private project. I don't have permission to share private research data with the world.

Also, I tried to submit my email to be notified for the mac app and was told it was invalid (it was just a standard @gmail address).

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

#69

Post by simonster »

How does your product compare with http://www.openscienceframework.org/? As a scientist, I'm inclined to trust OSF more, since it's run by other scientists, fully open source, and doesn't need to make a profit. At the moment, OSF seems more focused on tools to facilitate collaboration and less focused on replicating functionality currently available on GitHub, although it sounds like they use git as a backend and eventually plan to implement functionality similar to what Banyan (and GitHub) currently provide.
Post reply on HN