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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

It appears to require Docker. How will this play out with Windows only software and programmable lab equipment?

Down the road we'll be able to add support for specialized lab equipment in a case by cases basis.

For Windows only software, Docker and Microsoft seem to be making progress on that front. It's still to be defined how it's going to play out. Fortunately there are many cross-platform alternatives for most scientific software (at least in the AI area). Curious to know, do you have a particular software in mind?

No. I was comparing the requirements against my ability to imagine messy details. I suppose Docker jumped out as a different level of abstraction relative to the general problems of scientific reproducibility; the diversity of scientific investigations; and the existing social and physical infrastructure of scientific laboratories.

I suppose the sort of messy detail I might imagine is how does a Matlab license work in terms of multiple containers. And the details are messy because of legal and institutional constraints in the markets I suspect are looking for this solution.

Yes, MATLAB is a special case due to it being licensed software. I've used it in the past by mounting my local MATLAB installation into the container and I think I had to pass the MAC too. I believe we'll be able to get it to the point where we only need to mount the local license.

We're building a client on top of docker to deal with all this extra functionality. You can think about it like a specialized version of docker-compose

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