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

One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 267 posts

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#211

Post by naught0 »

Biganon wrote: post #171
AllegedAlec wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I hate programmers so much. "Hurdurdur it's not my fault. The end users are wrong. We shouldn't have to spend time creating an interface and UX that actually works as expected" Absolute fucking retards. We make tools for these people. If these tools do not work as end users would expect to that is our mistake. Stop coping about 'training end users'.

This. There is absolutely no excuse for Excel's behavior here. It's been DECADES and they still haven't added a goddamn dialog that says, upon importing data, "OH, it looks like your data contains stuff that looks like dates, are they dates, or are they NOT DATES? Thanks, have a nice day"

This does indeed exist in the latest version I have running. When opening a CSV all automatic conversion can be disabled

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#212

Post by cynicalsecurity »

lbriner wrote: post #161

Don't get me started on the automatic conversion of strings that it thinks are in scientific notation into numbers - which you can't switch off! We have large data exports from systems that include things like unique location code. You accidentally happen to notice that a block of these look weird and it isn't just the display of them that has changed, the contents of the cell were changed by Excel automatically, wit…

Why still use MS Office when LibreOffice is freely available?

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#213

Post by bikenaga »

spockz wrote: post #116
bikenaga wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - in a subtle way, you're assuming that the unary minus has precedence, when the point is that it doesn't. You're right that "thing^2" means "thing times thing", but in "-3^2", what is it that is being squared? To write it, as you did, as "(-3) x (-3)", assumes that in "-3^2" the thing being squared is "-3". But that in turn assumes that the unary minus is done before the square. By the standard mathematical conve…

Interesting. In our high school math class when -3^2 was hand written it was ok to interpret it as (-3)^2. But maybe that could have been because spacing would be used as some informal parentheses.

Leaving "-3²" to be "interpreted" according to context is not a good idea. Mathematical notation should be unambiguous and context-free as much as possible, not "do what I mean". A computation involving "-3²" will be right or wrong depending on what it means; that shouldn't depend on who is reading it or under what circumstances.

Not to unduly slight your teacher, but it could be they weren't sure about what "-3²" means. Everyone who teaches has gaps in their knowledge -- I sure did. :-)

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#214

Post by wruza »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #212
lbriner wrote: post #161

Don't get me started on the automatic conversion of strings that it thinks are in scientific notation into numbers - which you can't switch off! We have large data exports from systems that include things like unique location code. You accidentally happen to notice that a block of these look weird and it isn't just the display of them that has changed, the contents of the cell were changed by Excel automatically, wit…

Why still use MS Office when LibreOffice is freely available?

Does it fix subj-related issues?

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#215

Post by mark-r »

tssva wrote: post #173
lbriner wrote: post #161

Don't get me started on the automatic conversion of strings that it thinks are in scientific notation into numbers - which you can't switch off! We have large data exports from systems that include things like unique location code. You accidentally happen to notice that a block of these look weird and it isn't just the display of them that has changed, the contents of the cell were changed by Excel automatically, wit…

Is there a reason you don't specify the data type when importing or if it is a frequently used data file format automate the import using VBA specifying the correct data type?

If you open a CSV file without going through a specific import process, you don't even get the option to specify a data type. And once it's open it's too late to fix it, the original data is already gone.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#216

Post by wruza »

v1ne wrote: post #134

We have a saying in German: A bad worker always blames their tools. Excel has many quirks, but I'm still very grateful that it exists, for quickly putting together some numbers and still being able to change the inputs to my formulas.

Again, this saying has a nuance people often miss.

You don’t blame your tools.

Not all tools. Not tools forced upon by some archaic industrial standard or habit. Not stupid tools you’d never use otherwise but have no choice.

Excel has many quirks, but I'm still very grateful that it exists, for quickly putting together some numbers and still being able to change the inputs to my formulas.

That’s nice, but Excel didn’t invent spreadsheets. It invented adding BS to them and if it didn’t exist, you’d still have WhateverCalc successor available at the moment.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#217

Post by kstrauser »

kqr wrote: post #167
archargelod wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should agree that standard notation is too ambigious and switch to reverse polish notation: 3 2 ^ - -9 3 - 2 ^ 9 No way to misinterpret that!

Except 3 - 2 ^ makes it hard to express 3 2 - ^ without accidentally subtracting, so in this case a unary negation sign needs to be a different symbol!

I dug out my HP 50g over the weekend to play with, and conveniently…

Sigh. I understand why we commonly enter math on basically a teletype-with-ASCII, and I don’t have an urge to go all APL, but for a while we were so close to a future where we could’ve had separate negation or multiplication or exponentiation symbols that might’ve removed so much room for error. I mean, that little calculator and its predecessors were popular and widely used by the same people who brought us things like Unicode and the space cadet keyboard. If only one of them had said, gee, it sure would be handy to have a +- key on the keyboard the person in the next cubicle is designing as I have on the calculator on my desk!

But nope, Everything Is ASCII won and here we are. At least programming languages are starting to support Unicode identifier names, which has its own issues but is excellent for non-Latin alphabet users who want to write code in their own tongue. It seems like a reasonably short hop from there to giving operators their own unambiguous names. I can imagine a near-distant future where a linter says “you typed -3. Did you mean ⁻3?”, to the chagrin of programmers still entering their code on teletypes.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#219

Post by bikenaga »

Validark wrote: post #135
bikenaga wrote: post #48

An annoyance with spreadsheets that deterred me from ever using them in teaching is that they've perpetuated a arithmetic order-of-precedence bug. ("Bug" in the sense that it contradicts long-standing mathematical convention.) If you type -3^2 in a cell and press ENTER, the spreadsheet tell you it's "9". It should be "-9"; in math, exponentiation has precedence over unary minus, so you square 3, then negate the resul…

This is probably the most overly pedantic, nitpicky reason for not using a program I've ever heard. I'm aware that there are two different conventions on this issue, so I just use parentheses to get the behavior I want. But, growing up, as the top math student in my class, it never occurred to me that somebody out there wants -3^2 to equal -9, I thought it was just a weird quirk in some calculators/programs. How woul…

> This is probably the most overly pedantic, nitpicky reason for not using a program I've ever heard.

If you found learning math easy, you're fortunate. But lots of people find learning math difficult and frustrating, and things which might not have bothered you can be big deals for those folks. If I used a program in teaching which has a convention about basic arithmetic operations that is the opposite of the convention that mathematicians use, it is one more source of confusion and frustration for people.

Student: "You said that -3² was -9, but Excel says it's 9."

Me: "Well, mathematicians use a different convention than spreadsheets."

Student: "So which one should I use on a test? Can we use both?"

Me: "Since this is a math class, you should use -9, not 9."

Student: "How am I supposed to remember that? This is why I hate math ..."

Everyone will weigh costs and benefits differently. There is plenty of good math software out there like Mathematica, R, Geogebra, or maxima. Spreadsheets didn't seem to offer much, and there was this arithmetic convention thing that I knew would be an issue.

I'm sorry if you find it pedantic and nitpicky. I always tried to minimize unnecessary causes for upset, because there were difficulties enough learning math without my adding to them. If you saw people getting extremely angry or in tears because they "didn't get it", I think you'd understand. Math is really hard for some people.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#220

Post by _Wintermute »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #139

Know your tools. When I see such headlines, I feel sad about the state of this world and obstacles to progress, angry about the stupidity of designing all the tools for the most lazy of users, and at the same time I also laugh about the failures of proprietary software and its users, who could easily have invested a little bit of time to learn alternatives, but apparently chose not to. Yes the tooling they use might…

Working in this field, I think a lot of the issue is publishers often require small datasets in xls format for paper submission. So someone in the chain (corresponding author, editor, journal staff member etc.) opens the file in excel and saves it again.

Bioinformaticians are not doing their analyses in excel.

Post reply on HN