Anyone who cares about FreeBSD already knows this, or will find out on their own. Since there isn't anything surprising or groundbreaking about this release, all this story is doing is taking up a valuable slot on the front page.
I'd much rather know about something like this than "are you male or female" or what Warren Buffet thinks (both of them are in the top ten at the moment). This story is about as pure as "hacker news" gets.
I'm with you about those other stories, but I disagree with your general premise. Where do we draw the line for posting release notes? There are probably enough applications that this community cares about to constantly occupy 3 or 4 slots on the front page.
While I agree with your point, some releases are more groundbreaking than others (it's not everyday we get a new FreeBSD); So shouldn't the voting system take over at that point? There has to be a reason this ranks so highly here...
Well, downmodding isn't allowed.
Yes, there is a reason, and I suspect it is because Paul uses FreeBSD and there is an associated cult with what Paul does. As I said before, there's nothing groundbreaking about this release. I agree with you in that I would be happy to see significant releases here. :)
According to http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html, Paul uses a Mac. And this release fixed a major boot issue on 2 machines for me, so I figured someone else might want to know.
Last time I checked, the hardware has nothing to do with the operating system. I don't know explicitly what Paul runs now, but I know he has run FreeBSD in the past. I also know that the very article you linked to mentions the fact that Macs can run FreeBSD as an important point.
I don't care about FreeBSD in general, but I find such release announcements interesting and useful (for example, recent announcement of a new version of Postgres made me finally look at it and use it for a project.)