Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by gmfawcett on Thursday August 06, 2020 @05:44PM (#24075801)

A beautiful property of using ints to represent dates is that you can manipulate them using simple arithmetic. For example, if you want to refer to noon-time on 20200806, you can simply divide the day in two and write it as 10100403. An elegant, DRY solution to a perennial problem.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by trianglem on Thursday August 06, 2020 @06:51PM (#24076258)

I don’t get this? What does 10100403 mean?

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by gmfawcett on Thursday August 06, 2020 @07:04PM (#24076343)

The poster is gently teasing the idea that integers like 20200806 are a reasonable way to to represent dates. Dividing 20200806 by 2, we get 10100403, representing the half-way point of the day (noon-time). Of course it's nonsense.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by trianglem on Friday August 07, 2020 @09:08PM (#24088073)

I’ve been had

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by JackFr on Thursday August 06, 2020 @05:57PM (#24075906)

It’s beautiful. Just mod 7 to find the day of the week.

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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by gmfawcett on Thursday August 06, 2020 @06:05PM (#24075956)

Excellent example. Honestly, I have no idea why the concept hasn't caught on yet.

(I'd love to discuss this further... I'll be back on HN later tonight, sometime around 16834005.)

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