If You Don't Date Your Work It Sucks (date as in time, not as in romance) • Hacker News Board

Re: If You Don't Date Your Work It Sucks (date as in time, not as in romance)

#21

Post by patio11 » Tue, Jan 19, 2010, 3:52 AM UTC

iamwil wrote: post #20

patio11 wrote: post #17

One compelling reason to not date your articles is that age sometimes destroys perceived value even if it doesn't destroy actual value. For example, I have a bunch of stuff writing about customer service written in 2006/2007. That field has not evolved so much that "Don't curse at your customers" is bad advice in 2009. However, if one of those were posted here, the first comment would likely be "Dude, mark in the tit…

Shouldn't the judge of evergreen-ness be from the reader, and not the author? If it really is timeless, people will come back and link to it again and again. I see the Norvig posts on learning to program in 10 years come up again and again here. It sounds like if you wrote books instead of blog posts, you'd rip the covers off so readers can't judge it by its cover.

Why rip covers off when I can instead obsessively A/B test them and remove elements that hurt the business value of the IP I spent so much work creating, like dates?

Here's the fundamental difference between me-as-employee and me-as-businessman: I will get paid for my labor of January 19th on February 30th, and will never see another penny of it even if what I do today has lasting value. What I do after I get home, though, I get paid for every year if it has lasting value. I will not cheat myself out of that lasting value by setting an auto-expires header on it.

Re: If You Don't Date Your Work It Sucks (date as in time, not as in romance)

#22

Post by jsz0 » Tue, Jan 19, 2010, 4:16 AM UTC

Depends on the content. If you're dealing with broad timeless subjects dating isn't a big issue. You could read an article 50 years old dealing with male/female relationships and get some value out of it. If you're dealing with technical issues, or any subject that moves fast, it's more than a little irresponsible not to date your work. I've personally hosed multiple Linux systems trying to follow old out of date HOWTOs. I know better now of course but I still have to filter through hundreds of outdated results for almost any technical search I do these days.

Re: If You Don't Date Your Work It Sucks (date as in time, not as in romance)

#23

Post by jakez » Tue, Jan 19, 2010, 5:25 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #17

One compelling reason to not date your articles is that age sometimes destroys perceived value even if it doesn't destroy actual value. For example, I have a bunch of stuff writing about customer service written in 2006/2007. That field has not evolved so much that "Don't curse at your customers" is bad advice in 2009. However, if one of those were posted here, the first comment would likely be "Dude, mark in the tit…

I disagree. You are effectively saying elementary school teaching activities do not change and are the same now as compared to 20, 30 years ago. I admit there might be some valid cases of "evergreen" articles, but I would argue that for these cases, showing the date will not take away anything from the article.

Readers are smart, trust them to put the date in the proper context rather than hide it from them.

Re: If You Don't Date Your Work It Sucks (date as in time, not as in romance)

#24

Post by iamwil » Tue, Jan 19, 2010, 7:47 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #21

iamwil wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't the judge of evergreen-ness be from the reader, and not the author? If it really is timeless, people will come back and link to it again and again. I see the Norvig posts on learning to program in 10 years come up again and again here. It sounds like if you wrote books instead of blog posts, you'd rip the covers off so readers can't judge it by its cover.

Why rip covers off when I can instead obsessively A/B test them and remove elements that hurt the business value of the IP I spent so much work creating, like dates? Here's the fundamental difference between me-as-employee and me-as-businessman: I will get paid for my labor of January 19th on February 30th, and will never see another penny of it even if what I do today has lasting value. What I do after I get home, t…

I've had the same frustration as the OP where the date wasn't included when I was looking for time-sensitive information. It was a disservice to me-as-reader, and I ended up not reading the article and looking elsewhere, since I couldn't be sure of its timeliness.

If that article was timeless, it's because I hear about it again and again from other readers linking to it, not because there was no date on it.

Of course, I don't know what you write, nor have I seen the results of your a/b testing. So shrug.

Re: If You Don't Date Your Work It Sucks (date as in time, not as in romance)

#25

Post by Poiesis » Tue, Jan 19, 2010, 6:18 PM UTC

I'll add here that more people should date comments in code! Don't know how many of you are collaborating on projects, but It's a personal pet peeve of mine to see something like:

  // Updated for the new login system

...which of course has other problems too, but it's really annoying to try to figure things out when comments are out of date.