Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
Report a link problem
Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderIt's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. It's pisses off an enormous number of users especially in basically any non-US country (even if 01/02 is a date, it isn't the second of January in most of the world...)
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.
The real problem is of course using Excel to maintain data. That's not what it's for. That's what databases are for. Excel is for complex calculations over rows and columns. And of course it should be better at data validation; you should be able to tell it whether a certain column is a date or not, and Excel shouldn't be jumping to stupid conclusions about it, but it does, and that means you need to be careful and not use…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 1008
- Total comments
- 807
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-08-06 | Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as datesFirst breakout · Best thread | virde | 621 | 506 |
| 2022-02-06 | Scientists rename human genes to stop Excel from misreading them as dates | thunderbong | 2 | 0 |
| 2022-04-11 | Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020) | takiwatanga | 191 | 138 |
| 2023-11-24 | Scientists rename genes to stop Excel from misreading them as dates (2020) | EndXA | 3 | 0 |
| 2024-03-26 | Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)Hall induction · Latest 20+ point return | tambourine_man | 191 | 163 |