[mjw1007]

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".

My opinion of that is low.

[hinkley]

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.

[kayodelycaon]

I don't think it's that simple:

> 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.