I'm not really sure what the point you're trying to make is; What other purpose would a software blog have than to share information gained through experience?

Is it that the information is not helpful to others, because it is not helpful to you?

I guess I forget that there are a whole bunch of people on here that don't code at all. I think is really is lesson two, the one where you learn about functions and what to name them and about parameters.

It's not helpful to anyone who has written more than a few lines of code. Which is why I replied in surprise. HN doesn't let me down vote, so I comment.

I like to think that stuff on here should represent what hackers (coders) would find interesting. Advanced coding, distributed systems, the other wooly things like marketing, people skills etc. I didn't think this fell under the scope of hacker news. It's not news to any hacker.

I disagree. I've worked with people who have written tens of thousands of lines of code, but didn't see anything wrong with throwing a boolean parameter into the mix. It's not that they were bad developers in other ways. It's just that they valued immediate productivity over long term maintainability.

You'd be surprised how many authors of libraries have never heard of that lesson. A lot depends on how you learned to code and whether or not you were exposed to good programming practices. Universities tend to teach you that in a rote-learning way, which is as if they didn't teach you at all. And self-directed learners tend to encounter best practices at random.

As for the scope, I think the rest of comments here show that this article is indeed in the scope of Hacker News.