Yes, there are some toxic people here, as in any community or population, but there are also thoughtful and compassionate people here. This article seems to be mostly filled with the latter. I don’t know what your experience on HN has been but I encourage you to look beyond the that unpleasent post and consider the humane majority on this pot before you make your decision.
The main point is the same as the Dewey Decimal System. Keep things tucked away yet findable. Make a huge code base useful to people who didn't write it themselves.
If I use ordinal numbers to count, then counting tells me the number of objects. Sometimes I want to know the number of objects.
EDIT: Yeah, I don't know why book chapter labels shouldn't start with "0". It seems fine to me. They could use letters instead of numbers for all I care.
When I'm counting letters it's more convenient to go "one, two, three." When I'm finding the offset between letters it's more convenient to go "zero, one, two." Neither of these methods is going to displace the other.
Definitions are fine, and I agree that "A" is the first letter. But that's no use to people who need to think clearly about the offset between "A" and "C" right now. Should I tell them they're wrong, they have to count to three and then subtract one? Because the dictionary says so?
Offset is an answer to the question "where does Nth memory location start from?". The answer is "after N-1 locations". It's the count of locations that need to be skipped by the reader, to reach the start of Nth memory location.
I don't know but I feel like you are making a point out of something arbitrary. When I listen to an audio book, everyone always says: "Chapter 1", not "the first chapter" so why is this important?
I think extreme attention to to arbitrary meaningless details is how we ended up with most rules in language that we are starting to collectively detest.
Still, since the article already contains this warning, some people might argue that it's unnecessary for us to add it as a response to every comment here.
We've all read about them. The key lesson in every one of those stories is this: don't wait for the entire building to burn down before you pull a fire alarm.
It's not quite that simple, or at least not yet. For example the Cato Institute still seems inclined pretty much towards the rule of law and against autocracy. Perhaps "Yarvin-ists" are in power, but they don't control every voice on the right.
