So it appears his opinion is "If I arranged things so that readers could easily find out how old my articles are, some people would ignore them even though they still contain some useful content, so I will try to hide this information".
In the waning days of my own blogging, the second time around, I noticed a pattern that I would sort of build up a list of things to talk about, work through it after 14 months and then struggle to say anything I hadn't already said before. And maybe it was projection but I felt like I saw the same thing in some of the bloggers I followed. At the time I was following my Lit friend who was trying to find her way in the professional writing world and talking about problems of motivation and practice.
In later years I started to wonder if I wouldn't have been better off just embracing the repetition, because sometimes my opinion would change, or I'd encounter new arguments or counter-arguments from or while talking to my peers.
Mini-MSFT for instance had very few qualms about beating the same drum over and over every time new data came in. And as prolific (and promiscuous) as Martin Fowler is, he still ends up treading old ground.
It might be better for Dan if he dated things, and for us to see how his opinions refine over time as he retreaded old posts. My priorities have to shift when the sub-problems become more or less contentious. Some problems stay even as code reviews or automated testing becomes a de facto standard. Some intensify.
There are evergreen problems in human interaction. We have some of the same conflicts that Shakespeare talked about. We even have some of the same ones Homer talked about. But awareness and tools change and those can subtly affect how you address them. What is mastery but subtlety? If you think you are talking as a master or a wannabe master, then you should always have things to say.
I talked about Tai Chi last week. One of my favorite things about my first teacher was the experiences I had in the month after a field trip to train with a lineage holder, seeing how the focus of the instruction shifted, how the senior students changed, in movement and in conversation, and seeing how I notice these shifts. Things I might have missed when I was a neophyte - when you see your teacher and the craft as static instead of dynamic. Things I still miss (I know you said this was different, but it looks the same to me.)
And so I wonder if Dan either is wrestling other 'traumas', stuck in a very long plateau, or seeing past my horizon.
> I previously got a lot more comments about dates on posts, so removing dates from posts was a pretty large net win on the number of comments I get about dates.
When most articles of his posted to HN has people complaining about dates, instead of talking about the content, I'd hide the dates from my site too. I've been here a while and I find the majority of those comments to be low quality and are a net negative to everyone else's reading experience.
That tweet seems to contradict itself. If it being an old issue makes it more important, than isn't it also important to call out that it's an old issue? Sure, a date (in the far past) on the post might make people question if the issue still exists, but also points out how long the issue has been around.
Denying people information to make a decision because they might react in an uninformed manner is so hilariously on-brand for Dan Luu.
Remember his blog post about walking into an Apple store and harassing (and then writing a long blog post mocking...) a poor retail employee because he wanted a laptop of a specific weight, they were understandably a bit confused and thought there was some sort of XY problem and asked for more information......and for some inexplicable reason he could not simply take 15-30 seconds of his life to detail the need to them? No, see: Dan Luu is Very Important, Very Very Smart and Completely Unique Needs and you are just a lowly NPC service worker who could not possibly understand his needs or brilliance. And he never explains himself in that article either, because he's a troll.
The problem in the screencapped comment is the groundless accusation the information is incorrect, not asking if it's still correct. On many, many technical subjects, information that is five years old is uselessly out of date.
I've pissed away hours because I trusted a writeup or forum post about a problem or configuration method that stopped being relevant or even correct years ago. These days if I'm searching on almost anything technical, I immediately select the "last year" filter on google, or throw in the current year in quotes because I've been so consistently burned by this problem.
> Denying people information ... on-brand for Dan Luu.
Just to be clear, he does not deny the information. Chronology matters a lot, danluu knows this, and he does make it available. He also made finding it a personal journey for any first-time visitor looking for a date, costing about 60s per user lifetime.
He's unduly sensitive to bad criticism by ignorant people and admits as much. Reducing his exposure to them helps get him through the day, and so all the power to him.
As for the arrogance, I love this site and would keep coming here even if danluu were Pol Pot himself. Users and moderation make the site.
Not having the dates and versions was the main reason I switched to nginx. Every new project or company I had to try to get Apache and Tomcat to work together, and there was no runbook or cookbook for this. Just a series of articles that were very good, but only if you found the right article for the right IPC strategy for the correct versions of Apache and Tomcat.
Eventually the only thing to work reliably was mod_proxy, which is also the slowest option. And if I'm going to do that, I might as well run nginx, whose proxy configuration is only about half as mystical.
Of course the longer I use nginx, the more I need the subscription based features, so I'm experiencing an in-kind phenomenon where all of the google searches take me to the pro version. We aren't complete hobos. We have licenses for ingress and between services. If you're trying to reverse proxy in front of a process-oriented web server (Rails, Nodejs, Python, etc) you're talking about another order of magnitude and they are not interested. Every six months I keep looking at how hard it would be to implement a strategy better than round robin in the built-in implementation.
Just wait until HN adds the date, it usually doesn't take that long. That in itself also completely negates the reason for why he doesn't display the date in the first place.