I took the date out of my blog posts because I find the HN tic of putting the date in the title a little too precious. Obviously the date is important for some articles: the relevance of "Scientists make breakthrough in X" depends on the date. Otherwise it's just pointless enforcement of local custom, which by the way isn't in the submission guidelines.
I went looking for the date of this post because I honestly thought it was from the 1990s, when top-posting actually won.
The date is more important than you're giving it credit for. Every creative work has a context and an implicit perspective that comes from that context. This is especially true for nonfiction articles, where the date tells you things like:
* Whether the author is reacting to something that just happened or whether they have the benefit of historical hindsight.
* Where the article fits in the author's overall body of work (including works they haven't written yet!).
* What, if any, recent events may have prompted the author to write the article.
* The prevailing intellectual climate, which carries focuses and blind spots that may be very different from what we have now.
* Whether the article is about something immediately useful or whether it's more likely to be of historical interest.
You can already tell, for instance, that "Thoughts on Software Development (1998)" is going to be talking about very different things than "Thoughts on Software Development (2012)" or "Thoughts on Software Development (2025)". An article like "Better C Programming (2020)" probably contains some useful advice; whereas "Better C Programming (1991)" should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Instead of making readers ask questions like "Why is the person talking about operating system monopolies while saying nothing about LLM model ownership?", it's easier and more helpful to just put the date at the top.
Everyone should obviously be able to make decisions for their own content on their own websites/blog and more power to you for exercising your agency and choice here. I browsed through your blog and with your content on vintage computing and history, I can consume the content without having to care about a date.
However, I don't find that to be the case for most of the written content I consume and knowing where some content was created temporally is important context more often than not(at least in my experience). Now, I can't nor would I want to dictate what others do on their own hosted content(where they generously share their hard meticulous work).
Comments on HN and other places lamenting lack of dates however should be fair game to desire such additional context. But then again, you commenting back is just participating in the same dialogue so I guess my entire message has been just meandering.
I don't care about dates on titles in HN, but strongly care about dates _somewhere_ on any post online. Some indication of the time (range) when it was published. Even if the author doesn't consider it important it helps future readers (including the author! kinda like code comments!) answer all sorts of unanticipated questions about the post down the road. And it's easy to do. I do it all the time by reflex in my private longhand notebooks. So if you also consider this precious, I don't understand what you mean by "precious" and I have trouble translating it to some concrete ill-consequence that would preclude doing this very easy thing that might help one's readers.
