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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

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dnautics·

IIRC the stealth biotech startup "emerald therapeutics" is using mathematica to automate everything.

I actually am personally biased against this startup, but it is a fascinating use case.

EDIT: https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/customer-stories/researc...

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Really interesting use case. I'm super impressed with the concept, of automated data generation and gathering and having a common platform for the company. Perhaps the most impressive idea is that the data that is generated appears to be programatically accessible. I haven't worked in a large enterprise that has advanced past unsearchable and poorly indexed excel files that are manually manipulated/updated floating around on shared drives.

This wolfram implementation seems great, but I wonder about a lot of the annoying 'hard stuff' that would occur in a larger environment, handling of permissions different user roles etc.

For these guys the 'hard stuff' that really impresses me is interfacing with hardware. Scientific instrument controllers are notoriously proprietary and annoying to deal with. Though truth be told, in a small scientific environment not having user permissions is a 'feature not bug', especially if it's not siloed against other departments in, say a bigger facility.

Aside from personally knowing the CEO from grad school, a former co-worker of mine got hired into Emerald and basically transformed from a bioinformatician to a programming lackey... He may have hated every minute of it and quit.

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