After focusing so much on the ones and zeroes, posts like this snap us back to all that really matters: other people.

In the past year, I have made dramatic changes in my life, both personal and business, for one reason: so that I can spend time with my mother who is suffering from severe dementia. We watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune every night together. I yell out all the answers and she laughs, not caring whether they're right or wrong.

Before she started slipping away last year, she told me 2 things:

"From the moment I first saw you, I knew I would love you unconditionally forever."

and

"I'm so proud of you."

Everything else from this point forward is gravy.

Thank you, Alexis.

Alexis you bastard, making me cry at work!

That was a beautiful post and really hit home in a weird day. Both my parents are getting old enough for me to worry about their health and I feel like I still haven't accomplished anything worthwhile. Sure I have a house/car/career etc. but just for once, I want to make them proud by doing something big. I've had about 3 hours of my 15-minutes of fame but nothing solid to rely on, like a stable startup or research career. The weird part is I feel a large part of my motivation comes from my desire to prove to them that they raised a good kid. I can't even imagine pushing myself to accomplish something if they aren't there to witness it. I just lost my grandpa last month and my dad expressed a very similar sentiment about him always trying to be the best son to his dad.

Thanks Alexis for sharing this. You're a good man.

(Speaking as a FreeBSDer here -- I'll let NetBSD and OpenBSD folks cover those, since I don't follow them closely enough to offer accurate comments.)

1. We don't let licenses get in the way of making good technical decisions. This means that, for example, we had no problem with importing DTrace and ZFS.

2. We have more of an emphasis on doing things right. This often means that it takes longer before we acquire new features; but it means that once we acquire new features, they work and aren't likely to be removed or completely rewritten any time soon.

3. We develop the kernel and userland in tandem. This allows new features in the kernel to be accessed from userland faster (usually immediately) whereas in Linux there will often be a significant lag time before your libc supports everything in your new kernel.

4. We have stable development branches, and we're serious about them. Not "stable" in the linux kernel sense of "we think this won't crash" -- stable in the sense of APIs and ABIs, so that code you compile on FreeBSD 8.0 will work without recompiling on FreeBSD 8.4 five years later.

5. Our stable branches apply to the kernel, too. You can compile a kernel module for FreeBSD 8.0 and use it on later versions of FreeBSD 8.x, too -- linux, in contrast, has on occasion broken kernel ABI compatibility in security patches. ("Gee, do I want to apply this security patch, or do I want to keep using the video card driver supplied by my vendor?")

6. Personally I greatly prefer the FreeBSD ports tree over the linux equivalents, but that's just a matter of taste and what you're used to.

I'm a woman who was originally introduced to HN through Reddit and started reading about a year ago (this is a throw-away account that I will probably not use again.) I don’t really care about startups – I'm a physics graduate student planning on going into academia – but I do care about programming and tech. I have not yet been able to find an active online community that caters to these interests that I would describe as being "female-friendly." At HN, at least, sexist jokes are usually downvoted/discouraged because of their lack of content, which is more than I can say for Reddit. I generally enjoy HN except when the community decides to discuss gender, which it seems to do multiple times a week, even when it's only tangentially related to the article and despite it already having been beaten to death on this very site a million times over. These conversations invariably turn into, "Women: Does society screw them up or is there just something weird with their brains (on average of course, let's be PC here)? Dudes speculate." This is the most interesting topic to hackers, apparently.

I guess it's good to know that HN just feels like a woman-free space because it practically is, in contrast to sites like Reddit that feel that way even with ~2/5 of the users being female.