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Comment by marijn | Hacker News Reader

Every work has a time context. Even if it takes 100 years for it to become irrelevant, it is still useful for people to be able to find out when it was written. Books need a year, pdfs of scientific articles need a publication date. Doing your audience a disservice by not showing a date may have some shallow traffic driving advantages, but is still a dick move.

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Are you amenable to the solution "Put it in a header or give it emphasis comparable to the copyright notice rather than the title"? I think a lot of people agree with you in the abstract that it's a huge imposition to not have dates on things, but are unwilling to even right click to actually figure the date out, but they'll start doing measurable discounting of the work immediately if you do the typical thing and put the date front-and-center. I would also bet that people will simultaneously say they're not giving the date undue attention, mostly because people are terrible at introspection.

If you mean an HTTP header, no, that doesn't work, since you never know whether the thing you get there is an accident or an actually meaningful value. Putting it somewhere where it doesn't stand out is acceptable. What annoys me is if I want to know when something was written (for example because the interpretation of a reference it makes would be different before and after some historical event), and there is no way to find out.

I concur. It really irritates me that some writers feel their content must somehow be timeless and yet a year later it's superseded because something in the world changed. When I'm trying to research something completely new to me I cannot build up any kind of meaningful chronology using such posts.

I do agree that the date doesn't need to be right alongside the byline but an indication of date somewhere on the page is important.

Edit: As for people who devalue something purely because of the date, are these readers you really care about? I suspect there are annoying readers just as there are annoying customers.

That hides it from everyone but HTML pros, and even as an HTML pro myself, I'd typically not think to check the META if they've already designed the date entirely out of the visible text. (I'd instead check for 1st appearance in the Wayback Machine.)

I suspect the best hybrid strategy, for those who feel dates complete a duty to the reader, is to put the date in small, low-contrast text near the bottom. Perhaps also, when minor edits occur, update one or more similarly-subtle 'updated' dates. That emphasizes the material is not obsolete/stale, but live reference material still maintained.

I have no idea where browsers display that, and if you require obscure browser feature or source reading for people to find out the date, you are putting undue obstacles in their way.

He does not mean an HTTP header, just somewhere not prominent.

That's exactly how I'm doing it.

At the very bottom, just before the backlink to the home page, I have (in a smaller font size) something like "Original publication on March 2nd, 2014, last changed on March 16th, 2014".

I don't have anything to hide, so it's there, but I don't see any real value in it for the reader. So I effectively buried it.

pg's essays have Month Year after title, e.g. February 2009.

http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

I think the cheap feel to blog posts partly comes from exact date (and time even) that's often shown on each blog posts.

Do you think having both an originally published date plus an "updated on" date would fix the issue without being devious? The published date is important information to me, but if I see that the author has edited it recently it makes me feel that it has been checked to still be relevant.

I've noticed that some major sites where having up-to-date information is important, such as those providing financial or medical advice, have started adding a "last reviewed on..." indicator.

These sites also tend to have very obvious markers saying "this information is no longer maintained and only for historical reference" or "this information is no longer maintained but the new equivalent is here" where appropriate.

Personally, I find the indication that the information has been checked recently and is still current to be more important than when it happened to be published for the first time or when it was last changed.

Could you please provide more context on the extent of this discounting (esp. the measurable part)?

I like seeing the date. I get confused and frustrated when I see an article like "Simplify your web apps with JQuery" and there's no date of publication. Was it the first edition of JQuery circa 2005, or was it a recent version? At least when talking about a rapidly evolving software ecology, I think the date of publication is a critical piece of information to provide up front.

If an author fears the "bit rot" effect, then why not update the piece and provide an "updated" date, e.g.:

  "Solving World Hunger with JQuery"
  by Blister Peanuts, October, 2010
  Updated May, 2014

That magic "2014" cues the reader that there may be very recent, relevant information, and they are less likely to skip past it.

But by excluding the date, you eliminate the reverse: people being more likely to skip past it because it's not 2014. For some things, like your example, the date is very important. What solved world hunger in jQuery in 2010 may not work in the latest 2014 version.

But in Patio11's example on salary negotiation, the date isn't nearly as important. Some information is relatively timeless. I saw a comment on HN today advocating that people read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "The Prince". These books are still very popular today and were written in 1936 and 1532, respectively.

It really comes down to relevancy. If the date is relevant to readers, you should make sure it's easily found. If the date isn't relevant, why does it matter if it's posted anywhere?

Writing a book and selling it is just fine. But writing the same material as a free article on a website and failing to attach a piece of metadata to it is a "dick move". Thanks, The Internet.

Books almost always contain a date.

And while everyone enjoys free articles, there's still a huge future ahead. When searching for technical problems it's not uncommon to get results from over a decade ago. The internet is still in its infancy, so please, let's take all possible care to not pollute it.

Note it only applies to technical subjects and other fast-changing areas. I wouldn't mind reading TFA if it was decades old.

Again, the Internet, that believes that writing a solid technical article on using advanced statistics to place ads but failing to place a dateline on it is a form of "pollution".

That's a topic I wouldn't mind seeing on the frontpage even if it was dated from 1928. What I had in mind was more like "Reading the clipboard in Java (2004)" and "Configuring Apache for maximum security (1998)".

Sorry for the confusion.

I routinely check the publication dates of books where technical information will have changed, and recently got quite irritated when Amazon mistakenly directed me to the First Edition (2007) rather than the Second Edition (2012) of a reference book.

In that particular case, the book was about the business and finance side of independent film distribution. Information on that topic from 2007 is about as useful as an article on optimising web servers from 2004 - there might be some useful stuff in there, but a lot of it will be seriously outdated and the landscape's changed beyond recognition.

I also find articles on rapidly-changing technical areas to be essentially useless without time context. For example, I'll automatically discount any article about the more technical aspects of advertising on Facebook if it doesn't have a date on it. Advice that was valuable on that topic in 2010 is often useless or dangerous to your business in 2014.

Relevant, timely example. What do you think about this: http://blog.prosody.im/mandatory-encryption-on-xmpp-starts-t...

Here's an important point about dates. Do your customers care? Does preserving some notion of temporal context deliver more value to your customers or sales of your product than not having it does?

Decisions should be made to support the intended goal of whatever you are doing. A lot of creative work does not have a date stamp front and center and people still enjoy it.

For example, when a movie like Terminator 2 is played on TV, do you watch it? Sure. Do you freak out if you start in the middle of the movie because you don't get to see the opening credits? Are you annoyed that you don't have the date stamp on every frame so that you KNOW when the movie was produced?

We technical people might care a bit too much about formats and things, but to a normal, non-technical person i.e. most of your customers, they probably don't care. Most people don't check the copyright date on books or look up the year a movie was produced on IMDB.

No. The date matters. A lot.

When I open a paper book or a blog post, the first thing I want to know is, "When was this published?" That immediately gives me context as to the state of the world when this was written.

This is a no-brainer when it comes to technical publications because technology is changing so rapidly but it's equally as true with any other type of publication (even fiction to some extend, but much less so than non-fiction; the same goes for movies: entertainment is not as time-sensitive as a documentary).

A date of publication provides context for the reader to know what world the author was living in when he/she was writing. That's very relevant.

On my personal site, I put the year of every post right in the permalink (e.g., example.com/2014/my-new-post/).

That feels weird.

I only check a book's date when I'm trying to find out which edition I'm holding in my hands. It happens about once or twice times a year that I want to know that (admittedly more often in the last year since I was citing books in an academic setting).

Otherwise some imprecise idea about the publication date (Which decade? Possibly even less granular) might be interesting, but it's usually obvious from the layout, typesetting and so on.

I've really never wanted to know if a book was printed in 2008 or 2011, just to put the content into context.

> I've really never wanted to know if a book was printed in 2008 or 2011, just to put the content into context.

I have. I'm quite interested in financial crash literature and the difference in context between a 2008 perspective (which may be interesting in its own way) and 2011 looking back at 2008 is pretty large.

Edit to add:

That isn't to say the article is wrong, I think well organised permanent content can probably live well without a date on it. There are definitely items of content for which a date is important but for others I can easily believe it would detract.

> Are you annoyed that you don't have the date stamp on every frame so that you KNOW when the movie was produced?

Clearly, no one is suggesting any such thing. For movies, there's IMDB to find such things out. For blog posts, there is no IMDB, so if you remove the time stamp, you are removing access to a crucial piece of information.

> Most people don't check the copyright date on books

It depends! Would you buy a collection of essays about how to best market on the internet from 1997? Maybe, maybe not.

Other stuff is pretty timeless (hey, this Shakespeare is old!), so it really does depend on what the material is about.

> Most people don't check the copyright date on books or look up the year a movie was produced on IMDB.

Movies, not so much, because they aren't seek current factual information in them. Books, when used as references on things that might change, yes, most non-technical people I know do consider how new a book is when evaluating them for that use, often checking copyright/publishing dates.

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