(and yes, references must be 0-based [5])
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia
--
[0] This is meta-meta-contrarianism.
- The layman counts from one
- The uptight programmer counts from zero, because he thinks Dijkstra said so [1].
- The meta-contrarian (which I used to be) says fuck it, ordinals start at one [0].
- The meta-meta-contrarian reads Von Neumann[1], realizes he was formally wrong, and goes one step further in pedanticity, back to zero [0].
[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number_%28linguistics%2...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number#Von_Neumann_defi...
[0] Help! I'm trapped in a Boolean algebra[1][0]!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de....
[0] ... where xor is an addition that wraps around ...
That being said, my brain prefers 1-indexing programming languages like Lua, Julia, R and Matlab...
References would be unnecessary if HN comments supported such complex and over-the-top formatting as links (or escapable asterisks, for that matter, but then again who ever heard about using asterisks in a programming context?), which definitely haven't been a feature of all forum softwares since time immemorial.
It does not, and posting links inline often makes for unreadable garbage, hence pseudo-references, exactly as in mailing lists.
That said, I've come to like the footnotes.
Initially, I thought you were referring to the
"Submission is a link to a wikipedia article"
Don't you think some of the commenters might actually be academic, not wannabes?
This whole post is depressing. Far from lighthearted fun, these comments all have an undercurrent of hostility ("wannabe-academic"). The mosaic formed by these comments imply pg has harmed the world by creating HN. But that couldn't be further from the truth.
Imagine where you'd be forced to go if HN didn't exist, for example.
> Imagine where you'd be forced to go if HN didn't exist, for example.
A better HN. It is possible: HN was such a place a couple years ago. And it can only get worse if the community keeps taking itself too seriously to allow even light-hearted criticism.
If the reference took some non-trivial research to find, it is of course welcome and useful. The too-obvious Wikipedia link is an attempt to imitate references of the useful variety with the intent of appearing sophisticated.
If you're saying that, I think you're actually part of the problem. Don't get your news and discussions from only one place on the web. There are lots more and it doesn't cost you anything visiting other places and reading comments from other people. The only risk is reading elsewhere something that didn't get to HN's frontpage.
Outside, maybe?