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Comment by mikeg8 | Hacker News Reader

I emailed Dustin about providing more emphasis on dates just yesterday and this was the response I got.

> We want to encourage people to write stuff that has lasting impact. I think dates can just add an extra piece of messy context for some articles. What kind of increased emphasis do you want to see?

The more I though about it, the more I realized my desire to see dates is because that is what I know. In retrospect, the best writings I've read didn't need date information to make them impactful and I admire Svbtle more for standing out this way.

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I completely disagree with this point of view. I often feel that many blog articles intentionally leave out dates because they want to feel "fresh" or they pretend that they came up with some great ideas first or they want the convenience/unaccountability of fixing mistakes in previous revisions. And that is a cheating. If your ideas are fresh and timeless, they will speak for themselves.

Further, even if you constantly have amazing ideas, not all of your blogs are timeless.

Dating is not a messy context. Dates add to journalistic integrity.

Dates are must. They don't need to be big and bold, just to be there, somewhere. When I read a blog post, I need that information for context. It is especially true for technical blog posts. Was it written before version X? What was the context this was written in? Date helps.

It's not really about impact, but about context. If someone writes something that turns out to be obviously wrong, given the time-period, you could excuse them -- quite a few great physicists come to mind. Without that information, you might mistake them for an idiot. Or it can make a work even more impressive given the limited knowledge of that time-period.

Dates can also help when someone is talking about a technology which might have iterated past the point that their article is even relevant.

Language is very much context-dependent. Providing less context usually only helps misunderstandings.

Maybe they should put the date at the bottom? So you still see it, just after you've read it?

That's bordering on misleading in my opinion.

"Lasting impact" that can't stand up for itself, needs to generate a little confusion first.

Not everything has to be timeless. Sometimes I just want to blog about a quick workaround for a tricky technical issue I spent two days banging my head on. Such information may not be widely known, but it also probably won't be relevant in a few months.

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