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Comment by koverstreet | Hacker News Reader

What would _possibly_ make you think it was an act of dishonesty, instead of a simple oversight?

There's waaaaaaay to much paranoia going around these days.

I assume showing the date published is the responsibility of the publisher, not the author. In which case, it's possible Nautilus has an anti pattern of not showing dates.

Yeah, that seems a bit dishonest.

I didn't interpret king_magic's comment in the way that it was deceitfully dishonest, but that it was dishonest in that it lacked date. As in, that it is inherently dishonest not to publish with a date, and there doesn't necessarily have to be a dishonest intent behind it.

Honesty is a function of intent (being honest means acting in good faith), so "unintentionally dishonest" is an oxymoron.

Perhaps GP meant "misleading", but he said "dishonest" which implies intent to deceive.

I'm with you, but there's phrases like "intellectually dishonest", where "dishonest" doesn't imply deception as much as just a character flaw in the author where they're being unintentionally dishonest by favoring their own ideas for example. As the OP mentions, context matters and the word dishonesty has a few bends to it depending upon the situation or phrase.

Because, as I said, context deeply matters in science. Intentionally excluding publish date - which, by the way, is also not present on any of this piece's siblings - is intellectually dishonest.

If I'm reading this piece by way of a direct link, I have no idea of when it was published, diminishing its current credibility and relevance. Having to go hunt for that information is supremely annoying, and makes me wonder if they made some intentional decision along the lines of "well, if people know this article was from 5 years ago, they probably aren't going to read it because they will go searching for something more up to date", which would in fact be dishonest. To be clear - I'm not accusing them of that, but in an era of rampant fake news, why do anything to cause your readers to question your honesty?

I'm sorry, but this publisher exists in 2016, a time in which they know articles (fake or not) are frequently passed around in ways meant to misrepresent science behind them. There is no excuse for not including a publish date. None.

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