[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Curvenote (YC W21) - Collaborative writin...
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Launch HN: Curvenote (YC W21) - Collaborative writing tools for
science
Hi HN! I'm Rowan and with my co-founder Steve we are building
Curvenote (https://curvenote.com) -- a technical writing tool for
sharing data analysis and research from Jupyter with a wider
audience. We are building Curvenote to get science communication
out of PDFs and help researchers and data-scientists communicate
interactive, reproducible results (graphs, figures, maps, etc.)
that are linked to the actual data and computation. There are
currently two parts to Curvenote: 1) a WYSIWYG collaborative
writing environment for interactive, technical documents; and 2) a
Jupyter integration that adds version control and commenting and
can link interactive plots and outputs directly into Curvenote
documents (including any new versions or comments on those
outputs). Steve and I met in the open-source/science community and
are coming at this from different angles: Steve has led data
science teams, and keeping stakeholders and team members in the
loop with up-to-date figures/reports took a lot of time (via
emails, screenshots, PPT presentations, customer reports, etc.) --
leading to what he calls communication chaos. A lot of my
experience is coming from writing a PhD thesis, writing papers,
presenting early research to colleagues/supervisors, and developing
educational/training material around open-source projects. In both
our experiences, there is a collaboration gap between working on
data science (for us in Jupyter) and getting feedback or enabling
other people on our teams to remix the work, add context or ask
questions. We each had a lot of hacked-together solutions, that
mostly cut out anyone who wasn't comfortable in git or Jupyter.
Curvenote aims to span this gap by providing tools that enable less
technical (or busier) collaborators as well as integrations into
anywhere Jupyter lives (e.g. AWS Sagemaker, JupyterHub, locally).
We are aiming for the collaboration experience of Google Docs, the
precise presentation of LaTeX, and first class integrations into
computational notebooks - without changing data science tools. The
weaving of computational results into documents and keeping all the
links pointing back to your Jupyter notebook cells starts to build
an interconnected knowledge graph (similar to Notion or what Roam
are doing for personal knowledge databases) -- with a heavy focus
on research, where ideas, equations, figures, code can be browsed,
filtered and discovered. This starts to become a "web of science"
-- with very granular ways to address and remix content across
projects. I get really excited about this. A lot of content I was
producing during my PhD was shared between various
presentations/reports as I developed ideas over many years; I
wanted to see how the ideas were linked together and allow other
people (and myself!) to reuse parts of the work with the same ease
as importing a software library. We are seeing people producing
their lab-group meeting notes [1], writing reports that can be
shared inside their companies [2], reproducing research papers [3],
writing computational textbooks [4], and cross-importing data-
science visualizations across projects. Curvenote has a free tier
for public projects and we charge $15/user/month for teams. Our
other inspiration is coming from distill.pub [5] and explorable
explanations [6]. We are trying to make it really easy to create
and share these types of interactive documents and connect them to
computational environments. A lot of the components underlying our
platform are open-source (see https://curvenote.dev), including our
editor which you can try without signing up [7]. We also have an
active Slack community [8], with a broad user base: teachers,
scientists, data scientists, data journalists. You're welcome to
join! Really excited to get some feedback from the HN community -
happy to talk more on version control of Jupyter Notebooks, about
our open-source article editor, about explorable explanations, and
would love to hear if some of the challenges we have faced around
collaboration in data science/research resonate with you? [1]
https://curvenote.com/@simpeg/meeting-notes/2021-02-24 [2]
https://curvenote.com/@stevejpurves/computational-finance/mo...
[3] https://curvenote.com/@lheagy/pixels-and-their-neighbours/pi...
[4] https://curvenote.com/@geosci/inversion-module/inverse-theor...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[7] Editor demo here without signing up:
https://curvenote.github.io/editor/ [8]
https://slack.curvenote.dev
Author : rowanc1
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-05-24 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
| ivan_ah wrote:
| Very cool. I signed up and uploaded a notebook and was impressed
| with the stylesheet and presentation. Right out of the box,
| you're making the notebook output seem more like an article that
| someone might want to read (less distrinction between code blocks
| and markdown blocks).
|
| The export to LaTeX is going to be a very interesting feature for
| me, since I can collaborate with colleagues using markdown, but
| ultimately export to LaTeX for final print version.
|
| Good stuff!
| rowanc1 wrote:
| Thanks! The ability to copy/reference code and figures from a
| notebook to multiple other articles/notes and have comments and
| updates between all the places you reference a Block is
| something that is really handy when researching and
| collaborating.
|
| A lot of times I have found that a notebook will have a
| different narrative than when you are referencing and talking
| about the work in other articles and books, etc. More of a
| focus on "why" rather than "how". Curvenote allows you to keep
| things linked together, with pretty minimal overhead.
|
| Not requiring your colleagues to know LaTeX is a plus in a lot
| of collaborations, but still getting to that professional
| export at the end of the day! I was using a weird mashup of
| LaTeX in GoogleDocs for my thesis ... !
| dash2 wrote:
| This looks really interesting. I'm always happy to see new
| collaboration tools. Also, anything that moves us away from TeX
| is a win.
|
| I think Word export will be a big deal in many scientific fields.
|
| I've certainly found it hard to spread git to people who don't
| really need it's quite "heavy" workflow. Yet, Dropbox results in
| lots of files named "foo-Daves-version" or "paper-Jane-
| edit-21011201".
| rowanc1 wrote:
| I have also seen a lot of that sort of file-naming-version-
| control still in use. Git is really far out of reach for most
| people, and IMO not always the most appropriate for writing
| workflows where the version control sort of lives at the
| paragraph/figure/equation level.
|
| Word export (and hopefully good import as well) is certainly on
| our roadmap. :)
| math-dev wrote:
| What is Jupyter - is it like Matlab?
|
| Is your document format open source? IMO html / css is the best
| since it works everywhere (or nearly everywhere).
|
| The idea DOES sound AMAZING. Could be a game changer. Wish you
| the best for it
| rowanc1 wrote:
| Lots of similarities between Jupyter and Matlab. Jupyter is
| open source (jupyter.org) and is great for exploratory data
| analysis and integrating documentation/thought process with
| markdown. We are helping link that environment into your other
| notes, and keep track of reproducibility as you create a
| document or article.
|
| Our document format/schema is open source, basically
| opinionated HTML, and the ability to translate between
| latex/markdown etc. (see https://curvenote.dev/editor for a
| demo of the editor, the schema is linked there as well).
|
| Thanks - this is the tool I wanted doing research, that could
| help me out from group meeting notes all the way to the
| manuscripts, grants and papers I was writing.
| math-dev wrote:
| Also, sorry for the double post, but how large do you see the
| collaboration requirements of academia? Is there a lot currently
| or is this something you are trying to change with a lower
| friction solution?
|
| Can definitely see it as a very good way to share results and raw
| data (esp as we go more and more into a big data world), sort of
| like github but for academic data!
| rowanc1 wrote:
| I think that the collaboration workflows in academia could use
| some improvements for sure! A lot of the challenges I saw were
| around multi-disciplinary work, where the collaboration was
| necessary - but pretty limited. Curvenote is aiming to improve
| that with lower friction tools, as well as trying to influence
| the "size" of what can be/is shared.
|
| Right now a lot of the sharing is done right at the end, with a
| large scientific paper - and that is when peer-review comes in.
| I like the analogy of github here - in the open-source software
| world, there is a lot more iterative sharing of smaller, in-
| progress work where the feedback from a colleague/peer has a
| lot of potential to influence and improve future work.
|
| Curvenote can ideally help in tracking of the version-
| control/attribution around reusing and referencing work, and
| helping with collaboration along the way - rather than just at
| the "end".
| bioinformatics wrote:
| With that price tag I don't see a lot of appeal for most people
| in Academia outside really big, rich labs in US and maybe UK.
|
| Good luck anyway
| rowanc1 wrote:
| Thanks, over time in academia we would like to move our pricing
| towards departments or institutions paying, so our pricing
| model will likely evolve with that shift. Right now Curvenote
| is free for public projects (and one private one!) - and a
| similar price point to Overleaf (currently $17-$34/mo).
| tracyhenry wrote:
| This is a novel idea. Congrats on the launch!
|
| When I hear collaborative writing, however, I think of OverLeaf,
| which tons of researchers I met use for writing LaTex
| collaboratively. Does Curvenote support Latex editing out of the
| box? How can you make them transition to your platform if their
| workflow isn't data heavy?
|
| Btw - I personally am not very happy about OverLeaf. Its UX can
| be improved in various ways but seems lacking enough development
| support.
| stevejpurves wrote:
| In Curvenote's editor you collaborate on the content as you
| would in something like google docs, without needing to write
| Latex -- but with the features you'd reach to Latex for;
| equations, figures, citations, cross referencing etc...
|
| Documents can then be exported as a PDF which uses Latex for
| typesetting, currently that's with a default template, but
| we're working on user defined templates right now.
|
| When people's workflow is not data heavy, we think there are
| other features making Curvenote an attractive place to work;
| the WYSIWYG style of writing, real-time comments and easy
| sharing on one hand but also how Curvenote helps you easily
| reuse, update and build on your existing content.
| jdleesmiller wrote:
| (Overleaf co-founder here.) Thanks for the feedback --- I'd be
| happy to hear more about what you would like to see improved,
| either here or via email (in my profile).
|
| And to the curvenote team: Congrats on launching here! Happy to
| chat about collaborative scientific writing any time :)
| rowanc1 wrote:
| Thanks! I would love to chat about collaborative scientific
| writing! I will send you an email following up. :)
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