Top all-time · #8834
Neil Saunders
Personal blog · nsaunders.wordpress.comdatascience
Neil Saunders writes What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate, a personal blog at nsaunders.wordpress.com about data and science. Since 2009, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “A brief introduction to “apply” in R ”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Neil Saunders' blog covers bioinformatics, data quality, and R programming, including Excel gene-name corruption and R's apply functions. HN readers cite it as a source on these topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thanks for visiting this site. I'm Neil Saunders, currently working as a data scientist based in Sydney, Australia. Prior to that I worked in bioinformatics for many years including roles with a healthcare technology startup, the CSIRO, and as a researcher in several universities. Take a look at the
Most-linked posts?
- /2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and-excel-lessons-not-learned/3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-01-27
- A brief introduction to “apply” in R 3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-12-19
What Hacker News says?
The author is exactly right about the quality of data in bioinformatics. There are datasets with genes named MAR1, DEC1, etc. getting mangled to 1-Mar, 1-Dec, because of Microsoft Excel autoformatting. http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-a...
Comment linking /2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and-excel-lessons-not-learned/
on “A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)”Submitted An analysis of results from 23andme as a story · 38 points
HN discussionYes, some tasks can be done very simply, and decent programmers know this. I've written lots of Twitter-accessing code to do data analysis, but I love using the ruby-t gem, which lets me in a single line of UNIX (with pipes) do something like unfollow every user I currently follow who tweets more than 50 times/day and doesn't follow me back. The OP is railing against dumb programmers...OK, that's fine. But just beca…
Comment linking /about-2/about/
on “Why bad scientific code beats code following "best practices"”Submitted A brief introduction to “apply” in R as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWhile we are on the subject of excel and bioinformatics http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-a... http://dontuseexcel.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/dont-use-excel-... I like Excel for what it is supposed to be used for, and it remains the only MS product I use cause it does its job well. But it has limits, which are all too frequently abused.
Comment linking /2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and-excel-lessons-not-learned/
on “Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere”Submitted The real meaning of spurious correlations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt seems like there's good opportunity for skilled data scientists and engineers to make a real difference here. I do think that laypersons (to both medicine and engineering) think that practitioners in medicine and biology have mastered such mundane things like data pipelines, because you have to be so smart to be in medicine/biology, but my limited experience has been more along the lines of what Neil Saunders des…
Comment linking /about-2/about/
on “Big Data Coming in Faster Than Biomedical Researchers Can Process It”Submitted Project Tycho, ggplot2 and the shameless stealing of blog ideas as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere is a summary of the apply family of functions: http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/a-brief-introducti... These are very simple functions and I generally try to use them before moving on to plyr. The are easy to set up, understand, and faster. Obviously they cannot do everything, though, which is why there is plyr.
Comment linking /2010/08/20/a-brief-introduction-to-apply-in-r/
on “R: the good parts”Submitted Quilt plots. Like heat maps, only…heat maps as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIn bioinformatics work, Excel auto-formatting can screw up genomic data http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-a... . The problem with it is that formatting will modify entered text by default, and the user has to be actively aware of this behavior to undo it. Regardless, spreadsheets are invaluable for visualizing and processing tabular data -- but default behavior and user-end awareness are the…
Comment linking /2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and-excel-lessons-not-learned/
on “Damn Excel – How the 'most important application' is ruining the world”Submitted A brief introduction to “apply” in R as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAs noted this article is from 2004. Unfortunately such errors are still around, as noted by Neil Saunders in a recent blog post[1]. 1. http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-a...
Comment linking /2012/10/22/gene-name-errors-and-excel-lessons-not-learned/
on “Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors introduced inadvertently using Excel”Submitted Real bioinformaticians write code as a story · 1 points
HN discussion- nl · 2010-09-06
What exactly is RSS feeds from Google Scholar missing? (eg http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/create-your-own-go... )
Comment linking /2010/06/17/create-your-own-google-scholar-rss-feed/
on “Ask HN: An academic web app idea, anyone interested?” Submitted Monitoring PubMed retractions: a Heroku-hosted Sinatra application as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Life Scientists at FriendFeed: 2009 summary as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
