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Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

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Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#21

Post by JimmyAustin »

dmz73 wrote: post #18

Or they could set the format of the column to text instead of keeping it as general and everything would just work. If these "scientists" are having this problem then they haven't spent any time at all learning how to use the tool they rely on. Can we trust anything these people produce if this is the level of competence they have with Excel?

A lot of analysis is done using CSVs being pushed in and out of Excel. Doing so strips the formatting. Please understand the workflows being crying “skill issue”.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#22

Post by bdjsiqoocwk »

In this thread:

People who don't understand that excel is just a tool, which is useful but has flaws, arguing with people who don't understand that experts care about solutions not the tools, in which case it might be ok to compromise something unimportant, like the _name_ of something.

What these two sides have in common is the contempt for the actual experts for not building a tool that HN could build but wouldn't know how to use.

Peak HN.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#23

Post by bayindirh »

dmz73 wrote: post #18

Or they could set the format of the column to text instead of keeping it as general and everything would just work. If these "scientists" are having this problem then they haven't spent any time at all learning how to use the tool they rely on. Can we trust anything these people produce if this is the level of competence they have with Excel?

That's too much work. Nobody have time for doing or learning that.

Sounds like a joke, but it isn't. I know scientists who think exactly like that.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#24

Post by knighthack »

JimmyAustin wrote: post #21
dmz73 wrote: post #18

Or they could set the format of the column to text instead of keeping it as general and everything would just work. If these "scientists" are having this problem then they haven't spent any time at all learning how to use the tool they rely on. Can we trust anything these people produce if this is the level of competence they have with Excel?

A lot of analysis is done using CSVs being pushed in and out of Excel. Doing so strips the formatting. Please understand the workflows being crying “skill issue”.

Sorry, can't understand, and that excuse is unacceptable. It's totally a skill issue, and a failure of it, and a laziness of these 'scientists'.

You'd expect scientists - people working to understand the nature of reality - to have some base competency about how they measure reality. Could have at least used a database for things like this; moreover any decent database can often import from CSV and export to CSV as well. Excel is not at fault here; the 'scientists' are.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#25

Post by bayindirh »

JimmyAustin wrote: post #21
dmz73 wrote: post #18

Or they could set the format of the column to text instead of keeping it as general and everything would just work. If these "scientists" are having this problem then they haven't spent any time at all learning how to use the tool they rely on. Can we trust anything these people produce if this is the level of competence they have with Excel?

A lot of analysis is done using CSVs being pushed in and out of Excel. Doing so strips the formatting. Please understand the workflows being crying “skill issue”.

Yes, but you can create a small macro to the change the formatting and assign that to your table. Your CSV should import deterministically. That's not impossible to do.

I saw a complete analysis engine written as an Excel file, which accepts and exports CSVs cleanly. It can be done.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#26

Post by bayindirh »

mo_42 wrote: post #8

As a computer scientist this sounds ridiculous. Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers. I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way. They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read of…

We, as CS people, think computers are easy. However, for other disciplines, computers are not easy.

We can try to (and do) create tools, but it's not as simple as a table editor or a simple CRUD application. Scenarios has many peculiarities and edge cases.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#28

Post by knighthack »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #22

In this thread: People who don't understand that excel is just a tool, which is useful but has flaws, arguing with people who don't understand that experts care about solutions not the tools, in which case it might be ok to compromise something unimportant, like the _name_ of something. What these two sides have in common is the contempt for the actual experts for not building a tool that HN could build but wouldn't…

In this thread: guy pretends to think he's different from the rest, and is able to distinguish the "key issue" unlike everyone else - and of what purportedly doesn't matter, like the name of something.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#30

Post by makeitdouble »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #4

I think implicit conversions is the other billion dollar mistake in computing. It just shows up as a subtle source of mistakes in so many places. JavaScript, MySQL, YAML, Excel, PHP, just to make a few off the top of my head, have all caused countless bugs and security exploits due to implicit conversations of data which can be interpreted in multiple ways, and where the system happened to pick the wrong one.

I think these are billion dollar mistakes only because they've allowed for trillions in improvements in the first place.

People choose these system with loose conversions over and over again because it's an advantage up to a point. Of course it becomes a liability when expanded too much and used in now critical systems, but IMHO the tradeoff usually ends as a net positive. Which is why, over and over we build more of these systems, and they fare better in the market than the stricter ones.

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