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Comment by mo_42 | Hacker News Reader

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 offensive words into it. Depending on the structure of data this prefix could even be compressed with 0 bits.

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Gene names are potentially mentioned a lot in a paper, a prefix would be seriously annoying for reading. And which other characters would you want to use here in the names, a restriction to the latin alphabet and numbers seems very reasonable to me?

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.

A fair proportion of CS is precisely oriented around the fact that computers are not easy in ways that non-CS people don't realise, and provides methods for quantifying and trying to cope with that. I refer you to https://xkcd.com/2030/

I think the reason why first two examples can say that they are safe is that in case of failure, people die. And thus there was a regulation introduced. People generally care when they can die.

In case of software, rather rarely people die and when software is being done on something human critical (a friend of mine works on pacemakers), there a great deal of care being done.

So basically it's a wide range from DIY using a cheap wrench to person rotating a torque calibrated wrench on a rocket. Because just like the hammer, there is a wide range of use cases, some critical (e.g. pacemaker), some mundane (e.g. ecommerce).

Planes and elevators always have a risk of crashing and killing humans. And it did. Software doesn't.

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.

I was trying to find the right words to kindly point this out as a CS guy working in this space, thank you for just cutting to the chase and being blunt.

The proposed solution is also not really a solution in that it still allows for one of the main issues: random people shouldn't be responsible for creating names for things that should have unique IDs. Which is why things like ensembl IDs exist.

These gene names are human readable strings, not concept unique identifiers. We in bioinformatics / comp bio world strongly encourage the use of ncbi or ensmbl gene IDs. In general it is bad practice to use human readable “names” of things as a primary indexing key.

Yes that's true, unfortunately people do it all the time and there's really no way to stop it.

> Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers.

I think this is sensible actually. Certainly better than the inverse, Latin numbers and Arabic letters. I'm not sure why they put it in this way (with the ethnic reference), but they are really just saying about putting it letters and numbers that people use and would be able to spell out to each other.

I think your idea of a prefix though is great - simple.

I was thinking we could use Welsh and Wingdings. That combination would surely cause less confusion and improve readability.

it had happened, most of gene have id. but people still use gene name in papers.

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