In 2013 Mike Hoye wrote a blog post about why most programming languages index arrays starting with 0

I’ve spent far more effort than is sensible this month crawling down a rabbit hole disguised, as they often are, as a straightforward question: why do programmers start counting at zero?

So: the technical reason we started counting arrays at zero is that in the mid-1960’s, you could shave a few cycles off of a program’s compilation time on an IBM 7094. The social reason is that we had to save every cycle we could, because if the job didn’t finish fast it might not finish at all and you never know when you’re getting bumped off the hardware because the President of IBM just called and fuck your thesis, it’s yacht-racing time.

Recently, Hillel Wayne found fault with Hoye’s post, and argued that there might be valid technical reasons as well as the reason Hoye states.

This week Hoye published another post, somewhat rebutting the rebuttal while celebrating contrarianism:

I recognize enough contrarian in myself that I guess I’m obligated to be charitable with anyone pointing their contrarian at me. And charitable can be a job, for sure, but fair’s fair and a job’s a job. But there’s one larger point here, the real point that I wanted to make then and want to make now, that I’m not going to let go:

“Hoye’s core point is it doesn’t matter what the practical benefits are, the historical context is that barely anybody used 0-indexing before BCPL came along and ruined everything. […] I may think that counting 0 as a natural number makes a lot of math more elegant, but clearly I’m just too dumb to rise to the level of wrong.”

My point is not, my point has never been, that “zero indexing is bad”. My point is “believing and repeating uninterrogated stories because they sounded plausible to you” is bad, and I’m saying that because it’s really, really bad.

My regular morning routine includes reading a letter from one of the the Letters of Note collections. I’m always fond of the ones written by Kurt Vonnegut.

Learning from the incident you didn’t have

When an incident happens in an organization, the traditional response is to identify ways to prevent the incident from happening again in the future. The community around this website takes a different approach towards incident analysis. To paraphrase the late computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, incident analysis is no more about incidents than astronomy is about telescopes. Instead of focusing on prevention, we seek to leverage incidents as an opportunity to learn as much as possible about how work is done within the organization.

Import AI Newsletter on the discussion about the safety of releasing AI models without restriction

Rep. Anna Eshoo (a Democrat from California) has sent a letter to the White House National Security Advisor and Office of Science and Technology Policy saying she has “grave concerns about the recent unsafe release of the Stable Diffusion model by Stability AI”. The letter notes that Stable Diffusion can be used to generate egregiously violent and sexual imagery, and - due to eschewing the kinds of controls that OpenAI uses for its commercial product DALL-E2 - the freely accessible model represents a big problem.

Letters like this are indicative of a culture war brewing up among AI researchers; on one side, groups want to slowly and iteratively deploy new technologies via APIs with a bunch of controls applied to them, while on the other side there are people who’d rather take a more libertarian approach to AI development; make models and release the weights and ride the proverbial lightning.

Programmers are at their best when they can focus deeply on a task. Managers thrive when they have the energy to context switch. A good sleep and an efficient morning routine help a lot in both cases.

Andrew Huberman is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In this chat with Jocko Willink, Huberman discusses what happens in your body when you sleep and wake, and talks about practices that can help set you up for a day of good work.

Among Huberman’s tips:

• Aim to have a good sleep 80% of the time
• Get natural light in your eyes within an hour of waking up
• Excercise early
• Try cold water to raise your body temperature
• Delay your intake of caffeine by 90 minutes

Simon Willison’s recommended engineering practices are rock solid:

• Documentation in the same repo as the code
• Mechanisms for creating test data
• Rock solid database migrations
• Templates for new projects and components
• Automated code formatting
• Tested, automated process for new development environments
• Automated preview environments

Also from Simon Willison: Documentation Unit Tests (or Test-Driven Documentation)

Keeping documentation synchronized with an evolving codebase is difficult. Without extreme discipline, it’s easy for documentation to get out-of-date as new features are added.
One thing that can help is keeping the documentation for a project in the same repository as the code itself. This allows you to construct the ideal commit: one that includes the code change, the updated unit tests AND the accompanying documentation all in the same unit of work.
When combined with a code review system (like Phabricator or GitHub pull requests) this pattern lets you enforce documentation updates as part of the review process: if a change doesn’t update the relevant documentation, point that out in your review!

In Aging Programmer, Jorge Manrubia reflects on 15 years of programming and what he has found to be true for himself.