Firefox 3.5 is out
Great, 4 of the top spots taken up by Firefox, PHP, Wireshark, and Virtualbox release notes.  I know we've had this debate before, but I don't see why anyone wants 15% of their news to be release notes.  If I care about these projects (and I do), I'll subscribe to a related RSS feed or mailing list.  The only possible benefit I see is some useful discussion about new features, but honestly that's hardley enough benefit to compensate.<p>I've only seen the volume of release notes go up in the past month.  I don't think we should reward the people that post them with karma.  That will just encourage newer users to post more release notes for more and more tangentially related products.  I wouldn't be suprised to see some scripts pop up that automatically post release notes of significant projects (as we've seen in the past with pg's essays).  Heck, even if we restricted outselves to release notes of software used by YC companies, we'd still be overwhelmed.<p>I know it's an unpopular opinion, but honestly we can do better.<p>EDIT:  For those claiming that they are in it for the dicussion, point me to any useful discussion so far in any of the 4 mentioned stories.  As of this writing I count 2 or 3 useful comments, and maybe 1 useful discussion.  So I don't buy it.  Rephrasing the release notes certainly doesn't count.<p>Firefox: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680853" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680853</a><p>Virtualbox: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680692" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680692</a><p>PHP: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680649" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680649</a><p>Wireshark: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680286" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680286</a>