[paulyy_y]

Please don't use zero-based footnote citations, people will assume 1 is the first one (because that is the standard in like, all of literature) and muscle-memory click the first link when reading and have to then figure out that you are doing a non-standard thing.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I disagree; this is Hacker News, and the cultural background favors zero indexing.

[malkia]

This ain't Lua, Pascal, Basic or Real Life :)

[godelski]

Looks like your new here, let me help out.

Language is not defined by a dictionary or MLA guides or whatever. Language is defined by culture. Go ask any linguist if your in doubt. They’ll gladly talk your ear off about how language evolves and cliques form and how there’s in and out language which people can often identify others in their “tribe” by. Like respect for any culture, don’t come in and try to tell people what’s right or wrong. At least not until you can speak the language first.

We use [0] because it’s how you index an array.

More general to internet culture there’s also OP = original poster and we refer to comments above us like family relationships. Parent (you’re this comments parent), GP (the grandparent, one who used the [0] that triggered you), GGP, G..GP, there’s siblings/sister (everyone who replied to you) and so on. Generally people don’t say cousins, aunts, dust removed and so on but you might see it). RTFM = read the fucking Manual (RTFA for article). And many others.

Welcome to the internet and Hacker News.

[JonChesterfield]

The natural numbers start from zero.

[zamadatix]

Funnily enough, that's exactly the debate (whether or not natural numbers start at 0 or 1). There is no universally right or wrong answer, is comp sci nerds just tend to like 0 :p.

[Y_Y]

Everyone knows N_0 == N\{0} == the natural numbers without zero. This resolves the ambiguity and was my go-to for zero-denier professors in undergrad.

> But the natural numbers are for counting, you can't count to zero!

Why don't you count the number of cool people who don't think zero is a natural number, loser?

[0] also it works beautifully for pointer arithmetic