FreeBSD 11.4 - <AUTHOR> https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.4R/announce.html <comment><USER2> FreeBSD is a tremendous project. I've used it since the 4.x days, first for work (web/mail/database hosting, at the time) and then for personal projects.

I have a 2000-era desktop PC as a personal server that I had left collect dust until very recently after switching to Macs for daily work long ago. It was running 6.1 and I hadn't booted it in a few months shy of _ten years_. I booted it right up, and in an afternoon proceeded to, in small stages, update it to the latest 12.1 release, which I am running with great stability now, including live repartitioning and better use of the available disk space after going into single-user admin mode. "Recent" improvements that I've been appreciating have been a smaller/more dense console font, easier wireless configuration (it has an Atheros-based PCI wifi card), and easier and more clear package and ports management. AND it still runs fast.

<comment><USER3> An in-place upgrade from 6.1 to 12.1 without major issues? That is indeed tremendously impressive.

<comment><USER4> I've done the same thing with in-place Fedora upgrades over a similar time- frame. It is impressive, but not unrivaled in the Linux world. (I'm not playing favorites with Linux here: I'm a FreeBSD developer.)

<comment><USER5> There's also a famous video on youtube where some guy installs every versions of windows (maybe not 1 and 2) back to back and it kinda works (passing custom configuration most of the time too)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I will just use this oportunity to thank FreeBSD team (from kernel to ports maintainers) for their work on project and give my thanks in advance for anyone who joins it.

It was magnificent server for last 10+ years and I have never trembled before doing a major upgrade.

If you dont hear this enough: please keep on working your great work, maybe you are not the most used OS, but you have all my love <3 <3 <3

<comment><USER7> it's comments like this that make we want to take the dive. thanks for not only supporting the freebsd team but encouraging potential future users.

though with that said, i will say that k8s is taking over the world and bsds are going to be left in the dust for my use-case, non-(appliance, embedded, IoT) applications.

<comment><USER8> We've been hearing FreeBSD is dying since before it's been the year of linux on the desktop.

Is FreeBSD ever going to be hip and trendy? Probably not, it's not 1994 anymore. But, I don't need a hip amd trendy OS, I need an OS that provides a stable base for me to work upon and supports enough hardware that I can chose decent parts. As a bonus, I've found it easy enough to muck with the internals when it has benefited me or my employer.

<comment><USER7> I'm not questioning whether FreeBSD is hip or trendy. Not sure why you're bringing that up.

I'd pick up FreeBSD in a heartbeat if I knew that the investment in learning the platform would help me be productive in production. But like you said, it's not 1994 anymore and modern deployment and maintenance of an application stack is docker and k8s. A trend where the OS is abstracted away as much as possible. So why invest in FreeBSD? Okay, so maybe it's a nice OS for appliances; though so is Linux and I can continue to leverage my knowledge.

At home I run an appliance and thought I'd deploy FreeBSD on it to run my storage server. I was really excited to deploy ZFS, the BSD killer app. The justification for this getting more difficult to make since ZFS on Linux is production ready.

I want to use FreeBSD. I don't care that it's not mainstream. The unfortunate issue is that it's falling behind in my use-case, by a lot and that's a bummer.

<comment><USER6> I have submitted multiple bugs for ZoL, from prohibiting boot of zfs as root (for the sake of boot beeing faster (?) they are not doing zpool import -a(f) but rather rely on cache file which is... crazy). Also the .zfs/snapshot still doesnt work. Both are vital issues and still not beeing fixed.

Boot on Linux laptop now looks like:

\- power on

\- wait for recovery shell

\- `zpool import -a`

\- `exit`

In all my years I have never observed this on FreeBSD and... as I have said, I expect from FreeBSD to be rock solid and it never dissapointed.

ZoL? I wouldn't be running it on my linux servers for a while. The basic mistakes that they are doing are not something that apriciate from file system that is meant to be as reliable as possible.

<comment><USER9> > they are not doing zpool import -a(f)

That's an initramfs bug; the initramfs scripts are not actually supplied by the ZoL project. You should file a bug report against your distro's initramfs package.

<comment><USER6> I am on fedora with added zol repository and fedora 30 doesn't supply any zfs modules or initramfs scripts. I had to do my scripts to verify that the modules are included and don't break my boot process. And it worked like a charm... for a while.

<comment><USER9> So... the bug is in your own scripts? I'm now thoroughly confused what your complaint is :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anyone else is wondering like me who Bruce Evans is:

> Bruce Evans <firstname.lastname@example.com> > Bruce is the Style Police-Meister. When you > do a commit that could have been done better, Bruce will be there to tell > you. Be thankful that someone is. Bruce is also very knowledgeable on the > various standards applicable to FreeBSD.

[https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committ...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/committers- guide/people.html)

<comment><USER11> Seems he had an approach to reviews worthy of emulation:

"Code reviews from Bruce came in three flavours, "mild", "brucified" and "brucifiction", but they were never personal: It was always only about the code, the mistakes, the sloppy thinking, the missing historical context, the ambiguous standards - and the style(9) transgressions."

Source: [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contrib...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/contrib- develinmemoriam.html)

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't suggest emulating it. His approach to review was to exhaustively detail every perceived bug in any particular file when someone touched that file. Preexisting issues unrelated to the change. Style warts unrelated to the change. Subjective opinions unrelated to the change. In his emails, every one of these was a "bug."

There is some value in suggesting adjacent areas for future work, if authors have time and interest, but BDE went well beyond that.

I think Bruce should be admired for his demonstrated desire to improve FreeBSD, and for his great attention to detail. But I would not like anyone to emulate his code review emails.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h If you're reviewing a block of code, you need to review the whole final version (not just the diff) or you risk missing context and interactions. If you're doing that, it's simpler to just review the whole thing and not filter out some parts just because you later notice that it predates the current patch. Although I would tend to hope that he doesn't treat pre-existing issues as blockers, I can certainly see why a person would take that approach if the goal is code quality.

<comment><USER12> Touching other lines that are not related to intended changes will only obscure the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the idea of having a long term support release for 5 years was great [1].

FreeBSD 11 has been around for some years now, getting an update to which 11.3-RELEASE can be upgraded with minimal hassle is a major plus for FreeBSD.

([1] edit: referring to [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- announce/2015-Fe...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- announce/2015-February/001624.html))

<comment><USER14> We've effectively had 5 year support cycles since FreeBSD 6 -- we just never advertised it as such.

<comment><USER13> Quite right, thanks for correcting me. But I've been using FreeBSD since ~2001 and hadn't quite noticed, so the announcement did really help out :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I too used FreeBSD for many things between 4x and 10.x, but have made the switch to Ubuntu in the past couple of years.

Things I miss:

1) Jails without having to have a hypervisor system, Linux doesn't really have anything comparably as easy to use particularly with the iocage project managing the jails.

2) ZFS out of the box supported at at lower level than modules and user tools. ZoL has come a ways but Linux's political opposition to it is always going to be a weight around its neck.

FWIW I am using a ZFS pool that has never been wiped/recreated since FreeBSD 8. It was created on that OS and has been migrated between Linux/BSD twice over a span of 11 to 12 years.

Things I don't miss:

1) The lack of file/directory monitoring libs and third party applications because, honestly, kqueue sucks.

2) While simple SysV init was simple 15 years ago systemd has come a long way. I hate to admit it, but systemd is the better way at this point because I like having my daemons restart themselves without third party monitors.

3) Brain drain is real, it seems the last time I used FreeBSD that port maintainers are running thin and I don't have a suggestion for how to attract more of them. For many years FreeBSD's package/port system was the best in the world (yes, better than the Linux alternatives like apt and rpm too). I think pkgng's rollout was bungled, though, and while it may be better now it seems to have a lingering cost in port maintainers.

<comment><USER16> I didn't think there was any political opposition to ZoL other than the fact that its licence is incompatible with the GPL, and outside of a complete clean room rewrite, there's really nothing anyone can do about it. It's not like you're going to convince Oracle to relicence it.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > I didn't think there was any political opposition to ZoL other than the fact > that its licence is incompatible with the GPL, and outside of a complete > clean room rewrite, there's really nothing anyone can do about it.

I suppose it depends on how you mean that, but I probably disagree; when Greg KH can say, "My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant" [0], and Torvalds says, "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel... [the] benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it any more..." [1], we've gone well beyond "they just can't merge it because of licensing" and into "[political] opposition".

> It's not like you're going to convince Oracle to relicence it.

I've always wondered at this, actually; why _doesn 't_ Oracle relicense it? BTRFS, AFAIK, was started at Oracle but basically flopped; why on earth do they not simply bring over the far-superior ZFS codebase to replace it? They can't possibly be trying to protect Solaris the way Sun did; they've killed off >90% of the Solaris team [2] and AFAIK have made exactly zero effort to sell Solaris for years now. Why _wouldn 't they_ get ZFS upstreamed into Linux and make it a core feature of OEL (or whatever they were using BTRFS for)?

[0] [https://marc.info/?l=linux- kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=linux- kernel&m=154714516832389&w=2)

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds- zfs-s...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs- statements-arent-right-heres-the-straight-dope/)

[2] [https://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware- solar...](https://fortune.com/2017/09/05/oracle-layoffs-hardware-solaris/)

<comment><USER16> >I've always wondered at this, actually; why doesn't Oracle relicense it?

Honestly, I would assume because Oracle's response to anything charitable or nice is "fuck you"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FreeBSD is a delight to run, I use an old AMD build to host Plex, PiHole and some other services in bhyve VMs. Keep a copy of Absolute FreeBSD around for physical reference just like the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER18> During quarantine I decided to set up some networking equipment with FreeBSD whereas historically I'd have used Linux. Wow! What an improvement! Everything is so much cleaner, easier, faster to set up. I don't have to screw around as much to make it boot and install on headless hardware. I can boot off a ZFS root volume. Networking is simple and clear to configure. Documentation is great. I don't think I'll use Linux again in the future when setting up a server, if I can avoid it.

<comment><USER19> What kind of networking equipment? I'm thinking of ditching pfsense and going bare freebsd or pfsense for my home router box and a few more anecdotes of similar projects would be nice to hear.

<comment><USER20> Happy FreeBSD user here. I personally use a Protectli FW1 with FreeBSD 12.1 and PF (Kernel recompiled with ALTQ support for QoS) and it works very well! I tried to move to OpenBSD to get the latest PF features/syntax but unfortunately the interfaces are dropping packets and no one on the OpenBSD mailing list have been able to help me. Unfortunately for me I'm not a programmer so I'm not able to contribute/fix it myself but I have to rely on the community/devs. I have reverted back to FreeBSD 12.1 and still being super happy with it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21>
      "FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE Announcement
      [...]
      Some of the highlights:

      The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, and compiler-rt utilities as
      well as libc++ have been updated to upstream version
      10.0.0.
      [...]"

I found this interesting. Seems like FreeBSD is more pragmatic than OpenBSD. They are using the latest and greatest llvm/clang series.

For license related reasons OpenBSD is stuck on an older version of gcc. I understand that OpenBSD has now _also_ become stuck on an older clang/llvm due to license changes there too.

In the long run, not upgrading the compiler is going to hurt OpenBSD a lot, I think. A lot of mitigations are now built in the compiler and languages (e.g. C++) are accumulating features at quite a fast pace.

I was wondering if users of OpenBSD have thoughts on the above. Do you think its a bit deal? What is the solution? How does OpenBSD not get left behind as a platform?

Or is this older clang/llvm issue only relevant for the core system and pkgs would have latest clang/llvm?

P.S. It seems llvm on pkgs is still 8.0.x [https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/devel/llvm](https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/devel/llvm)

<comment><USER22> You seem to not know OpenBSD a lot. They backported and patched a lot of stuff into GCC 4.2. Clang will get the same threatament.

<comment><USER21> I'm aware they maintain forks and patches for many packages. However development resources are always precious! Now openbsd needs to devote them to backporting from rapidly evolving llvm. Effort that could have been spent elsewhere.

Also note that backporting may be unfeasible in some cases I'm guessing because changes to latest llvm/clang may be under the new unacceptable license. Openbsd might need to make their own modifications.

I'm not making a value judgement whether it was good or not to not accept new llvm license. Just making an observation that this is going to be a drag on the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This seems like a good place to ask. I saw this comment[1] few weeks back

> This is one of the superior aspects of FreeBSD: no parsing of human-readable > strings to get back machine-readable information about the process table. > It's available directly in machine-readable form via sysctl().

And started wondering how deep does that go in (Free)BSD? Is all info available in neat strucured format programmatically, or are there other places where you'd need to do Linux-like parsing of special files? Is there some good reading material of this aspect of the system?

I hope this isn't too inflammatory Linux vs BSD question, I did not intend value judgement on either approach.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425867](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425867)

<comment><USER8> As a long time user, this feels like something that's true but not. The userland tools to dump kernel information (ps, ifconfig, etc) get back binary data from the kernel, not human readable strings, so it's true, but other programs that might need that information would often be expected to call the same tools and then parse the human readable forms until the recent inclusion of libxo can provide machine readable outputs. libxo was added in FreeBSD 11.0, and I'm not sure how far it's been implemented; when I was still managing a large fleet of FreeBSD machines, we had a bunch of 10.x, so it didn't makes sense to update our scripts to use libxo.

<comment><USER24> viraptor was talking about C programs having to parse human-readble strings from /proc in Linux to get machine-readable data. That the output of the `ps` command is only human-readable is a complete red herring. That's not what a C program would use, and not the C API that viraptor was talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> After a year of trying Ubuntu as my at home dev machine, I'm going back to FreeBSD. FreeBSD is much more of a pain during initial setup, but then it just works. Where as my laptop with Ubuntu has the most finicky Wifi and freezes way too often, and I didnt have these problems with FreeBSD on the same hardware.

<comment><USER26> Do you actually get working wifi, suspend/resume and acceptable battery life under BSD?

Last time I tried (open)BSD, none of those things worked acceptably. The recommended way to connect to wifi was to manually edit wpa_supplicant.conf and battery life was a solid hour less than under linux.

I feel like BSD is a great "laptop OS" if you're the kind of user that leaves their thinkpad plugged in all the time, essentially using it as a small-form factor desktop.

Maybe it's better nowadays.

<comment><USER27> > Last time I tried (open)BSD

Sorry, but OpenBSD and FreeBSD are very different operating systems, it's not just "different distros" like in the Linux world

Whatever you tried in OpenBSD has most likely no relation to FreeBSD

Speaking of the things you mentioned, I personally would expect suspend/resume to just work out of the box in the latest OpenBSD, but not necessary in FreeBSD (it was never a priority for the developers).

You also don't need wpa_supplicant in OpenBSD (unlike FreeBSD), ifconfig should be enough in most cases.

For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning, as it's not a config priority by default, but generally (on mainstream hardware) you should be able to reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD, and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD

<comment><USER26> >For the battery life, you certainly gonna need some tuning, as it's not a config priority by default, but generally (on mainstream hardware) you should be able to reach at least 80%-sh battery life comparing to Linux in OpenBSD, and comparable to Linux in FreeBSD

Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop.

I have a small pcengines apu2 running openbsd but I don't enjoy tinkering with it. I find it cumbersome and unwieldy. The documentation seems to be mostly "complete" but it's definitely geared at someone who already has an in-depth understanding of openbsd, and lots of fundamentals are left unsaid, which makes it difficult to learn what the "proper" way to do something is. I end up with a patchwork of hacks and it's very unsatisfying.

It took me quite a long time to figure out how to get wireguard working on that box, for instance, whereas on linux and mac it "just works" pretty much out of the box.

<comment><USER4> > Yeah, see, that's unacceptable to me in a laptop.

I think you missed the last clause here:

> > comparable to Linux in FreeBSD

<comment><USER26> No, I didn't. Linux battery life is pretty darn close to windows on my hardware, out of the box.

Getting freebsd to the level of Linux only after significant tinkering just isn't a good ux. For my personal machine that's unacceptable.

<comment><USER25> You said above you were using OpenBSD not FreeBSD, they are completely different operating systems. Also getting the battery to last long on FreeBSD was a super simple config change, that took less than a minute to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been mulling over a decision to add a dedicated server for my postgres usage in my home server cluster. Ideally I'd like something rock solid stability and that doesn't require a lot of maintenance, and FreeBSD is definitely a candidate. Low resource usage, fast networking, and native ZFS are great benefits.

Does anybody here run postgres on FreeBSD? Any gotchas to look out for? Is performance comparable to linux? Anything to look out for when using NVMe flash drives?

</comment><comment><USER29> > The KDE desktop environment has been updated to version 184.108.40.206.19.12.3.

Is that... actually the version number? I thought KDE just used a 3-part version number (major.minor.maintenance or something).

<comment><USER30> I am no expert at all but maybe the desktop environment is a combination of KDE Plasma 5.18.4 and KDE Applications 19.12

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's a shame the popular VPS providers, like Linode and DigitalOcean, don't support easy installations of FreeBSD (and other BSDs). Does anyone know of trustworthy hosting solutions that make things easy?

<comment><USER32> How about AWS? Creating FreeBSD instance is trivially easy.

<comment><USER33> This seems to be largely due to the efforts of Colin Percival. [0]

Have to know where to find the AMIs though. [1] Amazon doesn't make this as easy as they might.

[0] [https://www.patreon.com/cperciva](https://www.patreon.com/cperciva)

[1] [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- cloud/2019-Febru...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- cloud/2019-February/000200.html)

<comment><USER14> I'm missing something here. We have lists of AMIs in every release announcement, and FreeBSD is also in the AWS Marketplace. (Also, for the automation nerds, there's an SNS notification which goes out every time we publish new AMIs.)

What would you like to see changed?

<comment><USER33> I wasn't very clear: the way the AWS Marketplace wants me to 'buy' the AMI for $0 is an annoying extra step. You're doing the right thing on your side, publishing the AMI IDs plainly, the way Ubuntu do. [0] The AMI IDs work fine in EC2 even without 'buying', if you already know them, so it makes little sense for Amazon to artificially introduce this $0 payment step, in the name of it being a 'marketplace'.

While we're here: As I implied, I recently got FreeBSD up and running from one of your AMIs. (I was just playing around, not doing anything serious, and I don't know FreeBSD well at all, my experience is with Linux.) Thanks for your work here. I encountered two issues though:

1\. It took a long time for the instance to boot up and for port 22 to open. Roughly 14 minutes. This is with a t3a.small instance.

2\. I was unable to confirm the SSH public key of the instance. The EC2 custom is for it to be written to the system log, which is viewable from within the EC2 web dashboard, but FreeBSD didn't appear to do this. (This can take a few minutes on Ubuntu and Amazon Linux 2, for whatever reason, but it works eventually.)

Also, and perhaps it's just me that trips over this, but I'd find it helpful if it were made more explicit that the correct username is 'ec2-user'.

I haven't tried out the ARM64 AMIs but it's great you're providing AMIs for both architectures. Amazon seem pretty serious about their ARM instance-types.

[0] [https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/](https://cloud- images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hasn't FreeBSD 12 been out for a while now? This is just a LTS release?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Correct; FreeBSD 11 has continued having minor versions well after 12 dropped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I changed the OS of my NAS a few weeks ago (from "Gentoo Linux" to "Linux Mint") to FreeBSD (mainly to have a "better ZFS" \- I read only later that apparently both Linux & BSD ZFS are being merged?) and the installation and configuration has been very smooth (currently up and stable with e.g. Xfce, gkrellm => just a simple NAS).

I miss only the "nmon" utility but apparently it's possible to "port" almost any Linux program automatically to FreeBSD Linux apps => I might have a look at that.

</comment><comment><USER36> Recently, a certain unmentionable trend in Linux system software makes me really want to try FreeBSD again.

What's the state of the art for unprivileged containers? I'm very keen on containers that look very similar to the host OS as they make excellent environments for teaching pupils about the OS, especially if the container host can fake them into being "root" in their container.

<comment><USER4> Part of the security premise of FreeBSD Jails is that jailed root cannot escape. So, jails are a lighter-weight container which satisfies that need. They can (and often do) look very similar to the host OS.

I think the gold standard here is hypervisors, and if you want to go that route, Bhyve is satisfactory for many workloads. But jails should be somewhat lighter overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> i don't use freebsd regularly these days but i happily donate to the foundation each year. keep up the great work!

</comment><comment><USER38> BSD threads are similar to PHP threads. Most comments are speaking judgementally about the overall quality of the product rather than the post itself, though in the case of BSD the judgment is overwhelmingly positive rather than negative.

<comment> iso-8859-1 PHP? Are you referring to the programming language? What do you mean by "PHP threads"?

<comment><USER39> I take it to mean HN discussions, like this one. Not threads as in process threading, which is what I thought at first.

<comment><USER38> Yes that is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Looks like a nice release. I'd be curious to hear from people who are using FreeBSD on the server, their stories of how it works out especially vis-a-vis working with newer developers who may lack depth in their Unix background.

</comment><comment><USER41> I love FreeBSD! It's such an amazing project. Just updated from FreeBSD 5.0 all the way up to 11.4 without any issues whatsoever. Tremendous.

</comment><comment><USER42> Rolled up to 11.4 a bit ago, easy and painless as ever. Thanks to all the devs that put time into this OS.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sad that it does not ship with Gnome 3.36, one of the best releases of Gnome ever.

<comment><USER44> OpenBSD is the BSD that supports Gnome

FreeBSD is the BSD that supports KDE

or thats how it's been explained to me. So if you want Gnome you should try OpenBSD.

<comment><USER45> >or thats how it's been explained to me

FreeBSD supports KDE, Gnome, i3 and and and.... OpenBSD or FreeBSD don't have a preferred DE, next time check for your self and don't believe in 'explanation's' from some douche-bag.

<comment><USER44> I tried to install KDE onto OpenBSD and was greeted with a wildly out of date install; while they might not have a DE specifically sponsored on their website, it's self evident which DE is preferred by the people that maintain and use the OS.

Gnome is updated to 184.108.40.206, while KDE is on the stale 3.5.10 in OpenBSD

In FreeBSD Gnome is updated to 3.28.2, while KDE is on 188.8.131.52.04.2

The Gnome on FreeBSD is 2 years stale, and KDE on OpenBSD is about 12.

<comment><USER22> If any, the best DE for OpenBSD is XFCE, and the most liked WM is CWM and FVWM by inertia.

<comment><USER46> cwm is really amazing, it's unfortunate it's not more powerful. Does everything a floating WM should do and nothing more.

<comment><USER22> I miss an "always on top" setting, but, beside of that, it's good.

<comment><USER46> I meant 'popular', not 'powerful'

<comment><USER22> But that feature exists since forever. It's a useful one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Germany: Migrants' Rape Epidemic - <AUTHOR> http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6527/migrants-rape-germany <comment><USER2> Sounds like another article that basically says "Germans are the problem and no, don't even dare examine this 6th century A.D. culture that is involved."</comment>


A plea for politeness (why must everything be "Now"?) - <AUTHOR> http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.835470.16

<comment><USER2> At the Radiohead online store, the "Buy Now" button used to say "Consume". Only artists could get away with making you click a button that says "Consume" to buy their stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, tiny article with 3 comments that is nothing more than fluff hits the front page...

Perhaps the number of comments should have more weight when deciding what should be promoted?

</comment><comment><USER4> "Call Now", "Buy Now", all just seems to cater to consumerism's need for instant gratification. Not too sure about it being rude, just short.</comment>


Another Richter Scales song - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/10/rip-good-times-hello-great-times-the-richter-scales-debut-another-instant-classic/

<comment><AUTHOR> pretty gay if I say so myself....the only good one was the here comes another bubble</comment>


Worldrecord: Protonet raises 1 mil. USD from crowd in 90min - <AUTHOR> https://www.seedmatch.de/startups/protonet-2

<comment><USER2> Is that another for-profit company trying to sell me another closed source product that they claim is safer than for example a Google hosted appliance?

</comment><comment><USER3> That was so crazy!

<comment><USER4> Beeing persistent [1] seems to pay off! :-) Well done.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317560)</comment></comment>


FriendlyData Announces FETCH, a Natural Language Interface for Enterprise Data - <AUTHOR> https://friendlydata.io/blog/fetch-announcement <comment><USER2> Where does it store the data? Can I connect it to my existing DB or will I have to create an etl pipeline first?

<comment><USER3> It doesn't move your data anywhere. You can just connect it to your existing DB and it will work out of the box, no data extraction needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great product, would love to use!

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a very interesting way to approach this issue

</comment><comment><USER6> Incredible innovative solution!</comment>


Show HN: Amazon, eBay, Shopify Images Scaling - <AUTHOR> https://thanhlai.com/scale/ <comment><USER2> Interesting idea, and I'm not sure what your goal is with this page but a couple problems:

Your HN title is "Amazon, EBay, Shopify Images Scaling", which in and of itself isn't terribly descriptive, but on top of that, your page does not communicate even that. It is not clear what the purpose or intent is.

As for the functionality itself, I'm given the option to place 4 objects on a page along with image uploads, and do a few rudimentary actions to the objects, and "Save" it as a new tab with the frame exported in Base64. Couple issues on this front:

First of all, the items are not to scale relative to each other, there's a giant forearm and a giant banana, but a tiny human.

Second of all, there is no option to adjust the order of the layers of these objects. I cannot place an arm atop an uploaded image when the arm was previously lower.

Third of all, "save" isn't actually saving. The exported image is not served as a download to the user, what the text suggested will happen did not happen.

Perhaps this solves a genuine need that I am struggling very hard to see. Maybe you built this to solve an issue you have, and maybe I'm not your target audience. Regardless, it is wholly unclear what the intent or purpose of this is, and your page fails communicate its value proposition to a visitor/user. Even if it provides value to me or solves a pain point, I am not aware of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jay Huang. I am very appreciated your feedback! Regarding your suggestions, I totally agree and am working on the changes.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Started learning Android dev, just released an app for Songwriters - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shaunchurch.songwriter.app

<comment><AUTHOR> If you'd like to try it for free come join the Beta group on G+: [https://plus.google.com/communities/104587189437093114899](https://plus.google.com/communities/104587189437093114899)</comment>


Visual Studio 2017 now fully supports Python and Django - <AUTHOR> https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/python/ <comment><USER2> I just bought VS 2015 in Oct 2016 and there is no upgrade path to VS 2017. Microsoft sold me legacy product and support says I have to pay again. This is still good old money hungry Microsoft that is trying to lure developer into their tools trap.

<comment><USER3> Should have taken the version with MSDN subscription: that one includes VS upgrades, various Windows licenses and even some Azure credits.

<comment><USER2> Why should I pay for things I don't need? Every other company offers upgrade paths but not Microsoft. Had I known earlier they don't care about small devs I would have bought something else.

<comment><USER4> > Why should I pay for things I don't need?

You don't have to, but you are saying that you need to upgrade.

> Every other company offers upgrade paths but not Microsoft.

Many companies are moving to a SaaS model. Some, like Adobe and Autodesk, don't sell perpetual licenses at all. For engineering software you've always had to pay maintenance fees.

> Had I known earlier they don't care about small devs I would have bought > something else.

Community edition is free for individuals and five licenses for small companies.

I get that you're disappointed that you can't upgrade for a cheaper price, but the perpetual, or standalone, license isn't for people who need upgrades and it says so clearly on the page (which might not have been there when you purschased it though):

"If all you need is the current version of Visual Studio Professional, you can make a one-time standalone license purchase. If you need new versions of Visual Studio Professional, access to Visual Studio Team Services, or have short-term needs then the Visual Studio Professional monthly subscription may be a better option."

[https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/pricing/](https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/pricing/)

<comment><USER2> Monthly subscription was not available for me in October.

> but the perpetual, or standalone, license isn't for people who need upgrades

This is endemic to Microsoft. Every other software I bought had discounted upgrade options. They also didn't say "hey we release new version in few months and will abandon this one and you will not be able to upgrade"

Maybe I am spoiled by other companies. Microsoft is certainly not small business friendly. Their support also was pathetic. It took them couple of months to say I can't upgrade.

<comment><USER5> >They also didn't say "hey we release new version in few months and will abandon this one and you will not be able to upgrade"

But preview builds for 2017 were available as early as march 2016, which comined with the prominent no upgrades included notice, should have told you the same thing.

<comment><USER2> I didn't see that. Was not aware of 2017 until it has been released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think it is a good idea for Python development to depend on Microsoft products. Eclipse with Pydev is an amazing option for example, and many people swear PyCharm is great.

<comment><USER2> I am staying away from Microsoft tools. They just want to lock you in and then suck all the money.

<comment><USER7> Lock you in? To what? I see it as just another option (tool) of the many available tools out there. If it is better than the rest and makes it easier to build solutions, I would consider paying for it.

<comment><USER2> And when you decide to switch to Linux your VS becomes useless

<comment><USER8> If you already had cross-platform in mind, then I guess don't consider C#, or any .NET stuffs.

Use something like Java or Python, instead.

Anyway, MS don't force you to use their technologies :p

<comment><USER9> C# and .Net (both versions) are cross platform. Core being made from the ground up to be cross platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Main gripe I have with PTVS: Please improve doc rendering, you can use sphinx to create rendered docs as Spyder does very well. It makes coding so much easier for use mortals you have not memorized numpy and every caveat. I'm specifically talking about the very large docs in functions, rendered equations, links and references. Putting all of that in intellisense hoverbox is unusable, make a separate window box.

Otherwise it's pretty good. I actually use both Spyder and PTVS and am unhappy with both. Bad doc rendering in PTVS, no git in Spyder.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this Windows only? I downloaded VS 2017 on OS X and the installer does not show the option "Web & Cloud > Python Development" as described in this link[0].

[0][https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/visualstudio/python/install...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/visualstudio/python/installation#visual-studio-2017)

<comment><USER12> Visual Studio for Mac is a lie, mostly. It has nothing to do with Visual Studio, I doubt they share any code. If they do, it's very little and very recent.

VS Mac doesn't support VS extensions. And a lot of other VS things.

<comment><USER13> They share code, but only at the core. Check out the Visual Studio for Mac thread for more details:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14308754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14308754)

Basically, it's not a full port, and it's probably not ever going to be, but they're trying to gradually make them more alike in terms of features.

In that regard they had to start somewhere, and as such, .NET was the obvious candidate for a first release.

<comment><USER14> VS for Mac is a rebranded MonoDevelop IDE (former Xamarin company) [http://www.monodevelop.com/](http://www.monodevelop.com/)

<comment><USER7> Parts of MonoDevelop, not just a rebrand. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14309709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14309709)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this hold true with the Mac version of visual studio? The site says Windows and Linux.

<comment><USER12> The Linux support is for remote debugging:

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/visualstudio/python/debuggi...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/visualstudio/python/debugging-cross-platform-remote)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335011)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The title is misleading as (from my understanding) no Django-specific features are supported. VS2017 'fully supports' Django as well as Flask as well as any other python library.

<comment><USER17> Looking at the documentation[1] there is a bit of Django specific support, including IntelliSense in Django templates, debugging for Django templates, and some support for manage.py commands.

[1][https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/visualstudio/python/templat...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/visualstudio/python/template-django)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm pretty sold on PyCharm for my full-blown python IDE needs.

Anyone with experience with both willing to report the pros and cons? Let's assume i already have access to the pro versions of both.

<comment><USER2> Pycharm burns memory, is slow and has a lot of bugs. But still it is the best options

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I see no mention of Mypy for static type checking. I sure hope this is on the road map.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does this environment extend to the full stack of Redis and Postgres?

<comment><USER21> I don't think there are any MS obstacles to running instances of Postgresql and Redis at the backend while developing on VS2017.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am curious is there anyone seriously developing django application in windows?...

<comment><USER23> I imagine there are many people who can't choose their deployment and development platform but can choose their language and framework.</comment></comment>