Hacker News Reader

Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

It’s worse than that. I liked this article, but it was anonymous and undated. I looked around the site to find out who this was. Despite the author wanting you to know about him, what other people think about his skills, etc., he seems not to want you to know what his name is. I find this kind of thing bizarre. Does he want you to guess it from the URL? I finally saw his name in his page about “books I wrote”.

I think his design ideas are sound. But visual design without any notion of information design is like having a beautiful car with no wheels. Or something.

View on HN

>he seems not to want you to know what his name is. I find this kind of thing bizarre. Does he want you to guess it from the URL?

I know this is hard to grasp in the world of LinkedIn that we live in, but would it shock you to learn that sometimes people just like to share things without it being directly marketed somehow? Not everything has to be a hustle.

> It’s worse than that. I liked this article, but it was anonymous and undated. I looked around the site to find out who this was. Despite the author seemingly wanting you to know about him, what other people think about his skills, etc., he seems not to want you to know what his name is. I find this kind of thing bizarre. Does he want you to guess it from the URL? I finally saw his name in his page about “books I wrote”.

I'm guessing that his website is work in progress or/and he's learning cms he's using.

>I think his design ideas are sound. But visual design without any notion of information design is like having a beautiful car with no wheels. Or something.

Sure, but you should learn from multiple sources as not everyone should teach about everything. It's up to you to connect that knowledge.

Or, the craziest option, he's writing out of sheer expression of his interests and doesn't care to "build a personal brand" or "gain a following".

Agreed. I do think it's better to publish good ideas on an imperfect site than not to share at all, but yeah, every article needs to have a date on it. Leaving it undated doesn't make it "evergreen", it just makes it annoyingly cut off from the implicit context of the point in time.

Agree about the date. Even saying the year is better than nothing.

In another of his articles he begins with "Stripe recently refreshed their website..." but we have no way of knowing what "recent" means. The article might be 10 years old. For someone focused on attention to detail, he has neglected the importance of date in context:

https://anthonyhobday.com/sideprojects/attentiontodetail/str...

Sometimes it's okay not to mention date, such as a movie or book review. We know it was written some time after the book or movie was released - a date already known to reader.

> Does he want you to guess it from the URL?

This is not difficult.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com