Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–169 of 169 posts

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

#161

Post by imtringued »

WorldMaker wrote: post #140
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just CSV being unusable shit. There's always a schema for the types of the fields, but there's no way to communicate that schema, so CSV is inherently ambiguous. If your data includes fancy things like numbers you should avoid CSV.

It's still a shame that Excel's JSON support is so good, but no business user trusts it because "you can't double click the files" and CSV remains the worst best thing you can double click. I don't want Excel to take over the file association for .json but I do sometimes wish Excel would just invent a file extension like .xljson that loads JSON so that at least you could trivially rename a JSON file to .xljson and ge…

You're talking about users of an operating system that hides file extensions by default.

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

#162

Post by chrisjj »

hulitu wrote: post #71
chrisjj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen no evidence this is a bug.

> I've seen no evidence this is a bug. Maybe it depends on your use case, but why it converts almost everything to dates ? Why not to numbers ?

A use case that excludes understanding this feature does not make the feature a bug.

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

#163

Post by WorldMaker »

imtringued wrote: post #161
WorldMaker wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a shame that Excel's JSON support is so good, but no business user trusts it because "you can't double click the files" and CSV remains the worst best thing you can double click. I don't want Excel to take over the file association for .json but I do sometimes wish Excel would just invent a file extension like .xljson that loads JSON so that at least you could trivially rename a JSON file to .xljson and ge…

You're talking about users of an operating system that hides file extensions by default.

No, I'm talking about developing for those users. Right now if you want to write the simplest, dependency lightest export code that those users can double-click and open in Excel you are writing yet another CSV export. It would be nice if instead you could take an existing API that returns JSON and wrap it in a mimetype like application/json+excel, and add a Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=thisapi.xljson and get Excel double-click support without another flaky CSV file.

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

#164

Post by Loranubi »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #109
bayindirh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We, as CS people, think computers are easy. I'd say we have a better understanding of which parts are necessarily / accidentally / capriciously / deceptively hard. And it's certainly subjective. E.g., Python's dynamism (typing, etc.) really trips me up, but others feel the same about strong static typing.

You should clarify that Python is strongly typed as well.

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

#165

Post by Loranubi »

vegetable wrote: post #147
beAbU wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very unfair and harsh comment. In my current work, we deal with our user's national identity numbers quite frequently. This number is a 13 digit numerical number, that starts with your date of birth. So someone born on March 13 1989 will have a number start with 890913. People born in the aughts have "00" "01" "02" etc at the start of their ID number. We need to frequently generate excel and csv reports tha…

You should never double click to open a csv file in excel. You should ALWAYS import the file into excel. Set your types during import. Many of the complaints about excel's csv handling in this thread are user errors.

Not in this case. Excel makes it extra hard for you to do correctly. They encourage the wrong way.

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

#166

Post by alentred »

k310 wrote: post #2

2020 article with this update: Update October 24th, 2023, 11:25AM ET: Microsoft has updated Excel on Windows and macOS, adding a toggle to turn off automatic data conversion. The original version of this article continues below.

Thank God they added a toggle and not an on-by-default fuzzy matching where "MARCHF1" would still yield "March 1st". What a pity if the genes had to be renamed again and again, playing hide-and-seek with Excel.

I am not usually sarcastic, but can't help it, sorry. Also, I do think this is a very much a possibility.

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

#167

Post by jjk166 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #134
shaan7 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call it cynicism but I think humans just prefer things to be implicit. I've been annoyed by how people do not want to be specific, but then rant about how someone did not understand exactly what they wanted. A certain CEO says that we won't need programming languages because you will be able to program AI systems with natural language. Well, the problem with natural language is not that we do not have the tech, it is…

>> it is that natural language is too imprecise. If only there was a trade, a group of educated professionals with specific training in the use of language to describe a desired outcome. We could call them "language engineers" and regulated them via state associations meant to protect the public from charlatans.

I wouldn't call them language engineers as they don't engineer languages. Such an individual would be more accurately described as a Language-Astute Worker Yielding Exact Responses.

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

#168

Post by jjk166 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #30
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…

> People choose these system with loose conversions over and over again because it's an advantage up to a point.

The world is full of antipatterns that people implement with little, no, or flawed analysis. They do not fare better in the market, they propagate the same way entropy does.

Post reply on HN