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Comment by mwnivek | Hacker News Reader

(2005)

It was true and applicable in 1805 and will be true and applicable until human bodies are not in fashion.

It will even be true and applicable once machines scan you and make your clothing directly to your own form; it will just be part of what the machines are programmed to do rather than what a human has to take into account.

I've never really understood the need some HN readers have, to insist on a date on anything that wasn't published relatively recently. Especially articles about things that do not change with time.

Maybe every post should have the article's date, so when I read old HN posts there is no room for confusion.

The site is called News so I think it’s worth mentioning when something isn’t news.

It's often a useful bit of context. It's not simply a matter of the validity of an article, but more that being closer to or farther from an event or discovery often changes how it's framed and discussed. It also helps set expectations about what related things won't be discussed because they hadn't happened at the time.

(it also helps clarify that nagging feeling of deja vu; "didn't I read this a few years ago?")

Its also an obscuring factor. Articles with dates specified don't do nearly as well as articles that appear contemporaneous. You can see this with the performance of titles that get modified by the mods, they seem to slow down significantly after the date is added.

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