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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)

#51

Post by sandworm101 »

smeej wrote: post #44

The article has now been edited to note that Excel now offers a toggle to turn this feature off. How long did the entire genetics community struggle with this problem before deciding to rename a bunch of genes, making their own data harder to search, without just...asking Microsoft to add a new toggle for their use case?

A consumer asking Microsoft for a feature? Thats like asking a mountain to build you a house. Ask all you want. The mountain is physically unable to comprehend your existance, let alone address your concerns.

I want an "always on top" feature for the default windows interface i am forced to use at work. Never going to happen. I want to remove all thise stupid references to 3d objects and VR that clutter some windows menues. Also never going to happen. A mountain doesnt have the ears needed to hear my requests.

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

#53

Post by bdjsiqoocwk »

knighthack wrote: post #28
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.

I don't have to distinguish anything, I just have to the humility to listen to what the experts say, rather than a bunch of webdevs.

EDIT: Also, i'm not a biologist, but I see the same phenomenon in finance where a bunch of low pay webdevs nobodies refuse to make an effort to understand why Excel is popular, push their half backed solutions, and then are confused that nobody uses them, and frustrated when showed for the 10th time the feature set, that they don't really have the attention to detail to implement. Then i come on HN and realize "oh so _this_ is where these people come from".

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

#54

Post by eigenket »

knighthack wrote: post #24
JimmyAustin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Haha, you think scientists have control over what software their employer buys for them to work on.

There are probably wonderful places where that is the case, and probably several of those places use something like libreoffice which doesn't do the idiotic data conversions excel does, but they are definitely not the norm.

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

#55

Post by msh »

I dont really get why every tool must be suited for everyone.

If excel (which was absolutely not designed for genetic research) is bad for genetic research purposes why blame microsoft.

Its like a craft man complaining that a screwdriver is a bad tool if your job is to put in nails.

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

#56

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

oferzelig wrote: post #47

It's from August 2020 with the latest update almost 6 months ago. Wondering how it got so many upvotes on HN now.

Because people don’t all ingest and retain every event that occurs throughout the universe?

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

#57

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

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…

To be blunt, there are almost certainly people in this field that know more about computers than you do. They aren’t a damsel in distress.

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

#58

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

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?

It’s utterly unreasonable of you to expect that your drive-by HN comment solves this problem for an entire community of people. This really just comes across as unproductive snark.

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

#59

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

knighthack wrote: post #24
JimmyAustin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Coming up next: people should still use C because writing insecure code is a “skill issue”.

Why can’t we as a society make ANYTHING easier without the usual blathering on from the peanut gallery turning it into a question of one’s intelligence?

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

#60

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

n4r9 wrote: post #35
otherme123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of scientists are very bright people that can't invest the time to learn another tool that maybe is worse than Excel (e.g. Google Docs also does the gene-to-date swapping, try writting "SEPT2", the known gene [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPT2 ] in a cell), investing time and effort in changing pipelines that work for them. Instead, the path of least resistance is to change the name of all known genes that c…

When I had this issue, the path of least resistance was to use Libre Office Calc. Of course, that's exactly the kind of application that my company now wants to remove from all systems for compliance with something called "Cyber Essentials".

You’ve answered your own question then.
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