It's helpful to include the year in the article header because;

Everything may have been true at the time of writing, but details may be obsolete. For example this article refers to Neo4j. Knowing the article is 4 years old helps me understand that comment is not current.

The landscape can change quickly. The older an article the more one takes that into account. Given that this article promotes an alternative technique, Knowing the article is old allows me to wonder if any of the suggestions were gelled, and if so to what success.

In this case, since SQL has been around since the 70s, it's not surprising that the complaints are not novel, and are all likely to be true for years to come. SQL has truly enormous inertia on its side though.

The year can help for sure - is the article's content still relevant and current in your mind?

On one hand SQL, is the most established relational db. Not sure what might drastically change about.

Python and Javascript are from the 90’s and have evolved as a language in their own way like SQL and others.

I was asking about the year as an individual comment here to understand what significance the year relative to the content of the topic it bore.

It's a HN convention for all posts: If it wasn't from within the past year or so, the year it was posted gets added to the title.

Having to think about it per-topic is just making it more complicated for no good reason. Especially since SQL does get new additions.

People posts comments like that as a reminder because the title originally didn't have it in there, someone edited it in after the comment.