The Paradox of the Unpaid Internship - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/the-paradox-of-the-unpaid-internship/266964/

<comment><USER2> The conclusion came out of the blue without any sort of justification:

""" Is it true that if the Labor Department cracked down on these internships and forced companies to pay the minimum wage, there would be fewer unpaid internships and students would be deprived of an invaluable experience that, as we established, can be worth more than a college education? Yes. """

</comment><comment><USER3> In the companies for which I've worked (media production and software), paying the minimum wage for internships was hardly a problem. The people in these internships were often senior-year or better, easily worth twice what they were being paid.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a college age person, I'm glad this isn't an issue in tech. As far as I know.

<comment><USER5> Not yet, at least. There seems to be enough demand for people with STEM degrees at this time that this trend hasn't penetrated (and a good thing too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article broaches an interesting topic, but is really poorly written and doesn't do any real analysis of the situation besides summarizing an interview. I'd love to read an article that did those things.</comment>


Practical startup question: Do you founders pay for health insurance out of pocket while working full-time on your projects? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Great question. Short answer, yes.

First, the way things are structured tax-wise, C corporations get to deduct founder health insurance 100%, so that's the most tax-advantaged scenario. If you pay for your own personal health insurance or do it as a sole proprietorship, etc. you're basically getting a raw deal from Congress.

I'm in California, where basically any 2+ person small business that's been around about like 3-6 months is guaranteed group health insurance for its employees at no more than 10% over an index that represents what bigger companies pay. It's a sweet deal. So if you're in California and are going to go this route, you may want to incorporate ahead of time to start that clock ticking.

So basically the company pays for the insurance for the founders, even though they're not drawing a salary. And you get much more flexible options than through COBRA (naturally) or personal insurance.

<comment><USER3> Be clear about this: a tax deduction is not dollar for dollar. i.e. is NOT free. You are simply getting a discount based on your tax bracket. (this is for the posters from the U.K.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I moved from Baltimore to Manila so that I could afford to pay my medical expenses in cash. By coming here, I've amplified my purchasing power ^2 and live more comfortably paying less. The birth of my daughter with complications and a c-section was just under $5000.00 USD, in a state of the art facility that rivals Hopkins itself (Google, "The Medical City Pasig City" to see it). A pediatric appointment costs me $10, medicine even less. I know my move was a little drastic, but it opened many doors. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Are you kidding? Who has time to be sick?

<comment><USER6> Actually, health insurance is an important factor. If you catch pneumonia or the flu, you're looking at getting knocked out for 2 months (pneumonia resulting from a "cold" that was not properly handled), 2 weeks (flu) without medical intervention. Personally, I'd rather take some meds and be back on my feet in 3-5 days than not be able to afford to see a doc or take some meds....putting my startup behind which would kill me more than an illness. Without insurance you're looking at least $110 for per doctor visit and about $90 bucks and up depending on what meds you need (PER prescription). Or let's say you broke your arm or leg because you tripped on your shoe laces while walking down the stairs of the Y Combinator building. Without insurance you're looking at about $2500 and up to get it fixed and that doesn't include the cost of seeing a doctor added into it.

Paying $120 bucks a month to cover potential injuries or finding affordable medical insurance and covering yourself for potential injuries is a definitely an important factor not only for yourself, your company, but also to prevent you from getting your co-founders sick.

It is true that if you're younger you are less likely to get sick. However, if you are under a substantial amount of stress, your immune defense will drop and your chances of getting sick increases. That's why you see a lot of people get sick during mid terms and exams.

So for all of you who are in a startup, I suggest you get at least 1000-2000mg of Vitamin C. Clinical trials have shown that taking 1000-2000mg (usually an 8oz glass of OJ, depending on type of OJ) of Vitamin C a day provides prophylactic use (prevents the occurrence) against acute stress induced illnesses.

<comment><USER7> You have to _pay_ to visit a doctor? That's insane!

 _I mean, prescriptions, elective treatment I can understand. But are you saying that you actually need to pay just to walk into an examination room?

<comment><USER6> For doctor office visits - they make sure you can pay before you see him. If you list that you do not have insurance, the nurse or secretary to will tell you how much it will be without insurance to verify that you can pay the cost. If you go to a "doctor's office" he has the right to deny you services if you can't pay (only for non-emergency incidences). However, if you are in an extreme emergency such as a heart attack or you're dying, he cannot refuse you his services due to the hippocratic oath.

However, doctors in hospitals are different. If you go to the ER (hospital related) the hospital doctor is REQUIRED to see you by US law...without verification of ability to pay. For doctors in hospitals, this is a big problem because we cater to a lot of homeless patients who walk out and do not pay...and of course one can't do anything about it since they're homeless.

Anywhoo, if you get treated in a HOSPITAL, always request an ITEMIZED list of charges. Anything that says "misc fees" you need to be weary off. Check for overcharges and outrageous charges. For instance, do you want to pay $170 for a "mucous recovery system" (BOX OF KLEENEX). Sometimes it's a "mistake" but sometimes there are unethical hospitals. Save yourself and your startup some money.

Cheerios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Massachusetts has a law that (may) be going into effect on June 1- It requires that all citizens of Ma have health insurance.

They have two programs to deal with this- The first is Commonhealth, which provides free or subsidized health care to those who, in the last year, have made less than 300% of the federal poverty line. Many people who are currently students may be able to use this, and have their coverage be at no or very low cost.

For those people who don't qualify, As on May 1st there's a new program, Common Choice, which will be a private-public partnership, to try to bring 4 or 5 low-cost health care plans to everyone. Given that everyone in the state now needs health care, essentially the state is negotiating it's own group rates.

It's not a bad system, but it's still new. The Poor are covered for free. Employers with over 12 people are required to offer Health Insurance. People who work alone, or in a small startup, can get a plan for ~ $120/month.

[http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=hichomepage&L;=1&L0;=Home&sid;=Qhic](http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=hichomepage&L=1&L0=Home&sid=Qhic) -Colin

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow...thanks for the heads up. My co-founder will be moving up to Mass. which is where we'll be based out of, so this is good info. Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Group health insurance is one of the perks of having at least 2 founders. According to my insurance broker, we just need to people on payroll working at least 25 hours a week to qualify for a group plan. Healthy people in their 20's get better rates than the elderly. (Zuckerberg's real reason for only wanting to hire young people)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm under my wife's health insurance, but otherwise I would be paying out of pocket. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Individual health insurance. Try <http://www.ehealthinsurance.com> or <http://www.integra-insurance.com>

2) Group insurance via a professional association. For example, IEEE: <http://www.personal-plans.com/product/ieeeinsurance/> It's quite expensive, but the coverage is excellent

3) If you're incorporated or LLC, you might be able to get a small-business plan through Costco or some other provider

</comment><comment><USER11> I do. And so will all other founders who are Massachusetts residents as of July 1, 2007. (A new law requires all residents of the commonwealth to have health insurance by that date in order to avoid fines.)

<comment><USER12> lol, as someone who gets free healthcare in the UK thats really amusing. Why not just make it a tax for the minimum requirement? (you could even make it dependent on income although possibly thats too shocking)

<comment><USER11> It is very politically difficult to raise taxes or introduce new taxes anywhere in the USA, even Massachusetts. Also many people in the USA are skeptical about socialized health care. The USA's system is definitely broken in some ways but it is not clear at all that the systems of other counties are not also broken in different ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Health Insurance?

Next you'll be asking for a paycheck ...

</comment><comment><USER14> This is actually one of the biggest strikes against YC in my pro/con table... I will likely have to take some F/F/F money in addition to the YC seed to make sure I will stay insured...

<comment><USER15> F/F/F?

Friends, family, and ?

<comment><USER14> Fools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I did a startup and recently got acquired. Here's what I did.

I say get disaster health insurance (30 bucks a month) screw cobra. its too expensive.

if you're in MA, i hear you can get universal health care and suck on the teat of the taxpayer. If you're in CA, Blue shield is cheap. If you want bang for the buck, I suggest Kaiser.

Also helped that my girlfriend is about to become a surgeon so she and her friends had me pretty much covered for normal stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems to me that if you're in the target demographic of a YC founder (mid 20s, no family obligations), then health insurance is not too much of an issue cost wise. In the states I've lived in FL and WI, my insurance has run around 100 to 130 per month.

Call an agent, fill out the forms... its all of a few hours of legwork. Welcome to running a business =).

</comment><comment><USER18> I would rather lock myself up in a room with healthy food and finish the project than staying out of action due to sickness. I would rather cross my finger and possible request the germs to attack me later :D

</comment><comment><USER19> This is another question I've been interested in, so thanks for asking.

</comment><comment><USER20> I pay it out of pocket along with some life and disability insurance; I think it's worth the peace of mind to enhance creativity and not worry about "what ifs".

</comment><comment><USER21> i do. i use tonik.com because it's cheap. might be worth checking out.

(only available in CA and a few other states)

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes, I pay for COBRA to continue insurance from my previous employer. Expensive but it's good insurance.</comment>


The biggest leak of TTIP documents yet: more than 100 confidential papers - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/3d0ftu/this_is_the_biggest_leak_of_ttip_documents_yet/ <comment><USER2> Proposal to make it easier for US professionals to work in the EU and vice- versa: [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2162296-14-10-07-eu-...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2162296-14-10-07-eu- kom-themenpapier-mobilitat-geschwarzt.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't know what "confidential papers" means but TTIP documents are published regularly (e.g. [http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1230](http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1230) ) but seemingly not many people are interested in them.

<comment><USER4> From this page:

> The European Commission is negotiating TTIP as openly as possible.

> A final agreement would have 24 chapters, grouped together in 3 parts:

> \- Market access

> \- Regulatory cooperation

> \- Rules

> And as part of our latest transparency initiative, we're publishing:

> \- new 2-page factsheets, in plain language

> \- negotiating texts we've given US negotiators:

> \- - EU textual proposals on parts 2 and 3 of the TTIP – these set out how > we'd want a final deal to read, line by line

> \- - EU position papers – what we want to achieve in a chapter.

> We will publish further texts as they become available.

> We will make the whole text of the agreement public once negotiations have > been concluded – well in advance of its signature and ratification.

Sure seems like they're trying to open this up... wonder what the leak is about then?

<comment><USER5> Saying that they're trying to open this up is like saying a fat person is on a diet because they've switched from regular cola to diet cola.

It doesn't make a dent unless they also exercise more and eat less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is so ridiculous that we allow these people to play masters of the universe, with little or no accountability or transparency.

We shouldn't settle for scraps.

<comment><USER7> My off-the-cuff reaction is the same as yours but look what happens to institutions where all negotiation is public: posturing, media tyranny, corridor diplomacy and a huge gap between public position and any real opinion.

Transparency has a cost also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Direct links to documents: [http://pastebin.com/fA7z2BPi](http://pastebin.com/fA7z2BPi)

(pastebin since HN wouldn't let me post the full link list as a comment)

<comment><USER9> Download them all with wget:

wget -O - "[http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=fA7z2BPi"](http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=fA7z2BPi") | wge -i -

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TTIP: Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership- a secret deal between US and EU

<comment><USER11> It's correct that much of the details are secret, but I'd stay it's still more correct to label it as a free-trade agreement than a 'secret deal'.

I think it's insane that negotiations aren't public, and I also disagree with some of the contents being discussed. But I think it's more objectively described as a free-trade agreement (in which there are also a lot of good parts).

<comment><USER10> That's a fair point, but since we are all pissed off at our governments for taking liberties with our well-intentioned permission to conduct espionage on behalf of our well-being, your are extending more benefit-of-the-doubt than a lot of us are. That's probably to your credit. But I am wary that the 'secret' stuff has a lot of implications that are only on the edge of what we would think of as trade agreement- intel sharing and such.

It _could_ , I suppose, be a positive: everybody come clean about the past(keep that stuff a secret) and then have fair and reasonable limitations going forward. There was a day when I thought like that... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know credentials of the people negotiating these deals? Are they well-paid?

If these deals' negotiations have to be secret and since so much is at stake, I'd hope my government would have the best negotiators, psychologists, economists, spies, or other personnel that money can buy.

<comment><USER4> Based on ExpiredLink's comment elsewhere in this thread, it doesn't seem like the deal is secret at all? Here's the EU page on it: [http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1230](http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=1230)

<comment><USER11> I some parts are still held secret; this is only the EU-side, I think the US are still keeping their citizens in the dark; and EU only started publishing some details after heavy criticism, it should have been transparent from the beginning.

<comment><USER13> And the EU side decided that all ISDS trials have to be done at a court that is staffed with judges from both contract partners and rules in public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Needs a mirror</comment>


Kapton: Miracle Material with a Tragic History - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2018/04/04/kapton-miracle-material-with-a-tragic-history/ <comment><USER2> Kapton tape is also a great example of how Amazon algorithmically enables knockoff and counterfeit goods.

I recently bought the #1 result on Amazon for "kapton tape". A banner on the item's description proclaimed that the listing was "Amazon's Choice for Kapton tape". So I ordered it without doing any more due diligence. When the item arrives, it turns out that it isn't Kapton. It's a knockoff called "Koptan". In their defense, the actual vendor's description doesn't call it Kapton, just the "Amazon's Choice" banner. Kinda sneaky

The tape I got looks a lot like Kapton. But is actually the same thing? Who the fuck knows. At the very least, my house hasn't burned down yet

<comment><USER3> I bought a roll direct from 3M a few weeks back. Was well over $40. It would also appear they don't call it kapton, but instead thermosetting adhesive.

Checkout 3M 5413 AMBER. Larger rolls can cost upwards of $300, not cheap stuff.

<comment><USER4> Digikey is one of the primary vendors of 3M, and well known for reliability as a counterfeit-free distributor.

[https://www.digikey.com/short/zrz730](https://www.digikey.com/short/zrz730)

Also, even if you've not used them before or have no need of kapton tape, take a look because their parametric search is one of the greatest I've seen, and makes Amazon's Choice system seem awful in comparison.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I regularly order from them, but shipping via DigiKey hasn't been great lately where I live so I went with 3M. I also highly recommend digi-key for anyone's kapton needs. Edit: spelling

<comment><USER5> I've been tending toward using Mouser lately. DigiKey seems to be playing games with low-volume prices on me lately as well as screwing up shipping.

<comment><USER6> The only trouble we've had with Digi-Key over the last six months, with dozens of orders, has been coming too close to their end-of-day shipment cutoff. (It seems to be closer in practice to 7:30pm than their advertised 8 CT, but I'm not begrudging them that during this pandemic! This is avoiding restricted materials such as lithium batteries, flux, etc., as well as avoiding value- added items. Order those earlier in the day if you want them fast!) Most of our orders are overnighted, for what that's worth; I know the big distributors do treat overnights differently.

We have never seen a single issue with pricing not as advertised at small quantities, or a shipping mistake not directly attributable to the carrier.

Mouser has performed similarly well but is (and has always been) significantly worse with their cutoff. Again, they're nominally 8pm CT but 6 or 6:30 is more realistic if you're counting on it being here the very next day.

Both are amazing if you're used to crappier distributors, but you do pay for it....

<comment><USER5> > We have never seen a single issue with pricing not as advertised at small > quantities

Ah. No, we haven't either.

The issue is that we have caught DigiKey charging different prices based upon login status and cookie status on low volume order items.

This would be fine if they were charging the returning customer less, but we caught them charging more. That made us _very_ unhappy.

Maybe it was a bug. Maybe it was an A/B test. However, if I have to scrutinize my order cart, we're done.

We still use DigiKey. But we have significantly reduced our volume through them and we watch them like a hawk.

<comment><USER6> OK, now _that_ I wouldn't have expected! Thanks for the heads up! (Not that I'd likely be able to observe it with our weird procurement flow....)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As PaulHoule has pointed out, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24179043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24179043) , Kapton is the final "gold foil" layer in a foil sandwich to insulate almost all spacecraft, inclusive of the LEM. It was used extensively as insulation in almost every Apollo subsystem, including the Command Module, and it became a small tradition to take pieces of the foil with you after splashdown. A final keepsake after a mission gone well.

Others adopted the tradition and pilfered more pieces of foil. They were fairly indiscriminate. And spread the fruits widely. You can buy your own from places like here, [https://shop.minimuseum.com/products/apollo-11-command- modul...](https://shop.minimuseum.com/products/apollo-11-command-module-foil)

Personally, I would have loved to own a piece of our robotic explorers. Kapton has been used in incredible ways in craft like New Horizons. It's possible to overheat instruments in an object millions of miles away from the sun! [https://mattcbergman.com/2015/08/02/new-horizons-thermal- con...](https://mattcbergman.com/2015/08/02/new-horizons-thermal-control- system/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Kapton insulation was not shown to be the root cause of the crash of Swissair 111, nor was it entirely ruled out. [https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports- reports/aviation/1998/a98...](https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports- reports/aviation/1998/a98h0003/a98h0003.pdf)

<comment><USER9> I read the report and it seems to put most blame on all the flammable materials present than the initial arcing event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you see a picture a satellite wrapped up in what looks like gold foil it is probably Kapton film with aluminum coating on the other side.

It is an expensive polymer compared to BoPET (a.k.a. Mylar) but it doesn't have the complex production complex. Mylar films are stronger but Kapton holds up better in the space environment so it is still the #1 choice for solar sails.

<comment><USER11> > it doesn't have the complex production complex

I wondered about the manufacturing life cycle dynamics of DuPont's Kapton, particularly after reading this in the article:

> Planes built since then generally use TKT, which is Kapton with two thin > layers of Teflon to provide better resistance to mechanical abrasion and > water intrusion.

Would a measurement of the complexity of the production complex include the part where they dump the untreated toxic manufacturing waste into virgin streams in West Virginia, or would that be an externality?

I recently saw a film produced by Mark Ruffalo that told the story of the West Virginia farmers whose stream was poisoned. They had to spend 7 years fighting DuPont's lawyers for justice, and then they died of cancer.

Dark Waters trailer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAOuhyunhY)

<comment><USER10> Teflon is bad enough in terms of persistent organic pollutants.

The PET in BoPet (Mylar) is one of the most environmentally favorable plastics in practice used to make plastic coke bottles that look like coke bottles also as "polyester" fabrics. The "Bo" is the part that looks complex to me in that mylar production involves a careful process of stressing it in two different directions while annealing it.

It is funny because I have been tracing out the path to manufacture large Kapton/Al films using asteroid materials. It is not hard at all to find an asteroid with the resources, but the trick is building a 'chemical factory factory' that can turn space hydrocarbons into plastic films, assembling that -- the Chinese think they could build a sunshade at L1 Sunward for $60 Trillion with Long March tech, maybe SpaceX can do $5 Trillion with Starship, but to make it cheaper than that you have to make it from minor planets and turn all the 'difficulties' such as 'working into zero gravity' into opportunities such as 'easily handle films larger than New Jersey'.

<comment><USER12> I'm also working the planetary sunshade. Any source for the Chinese $60T price point?

<comment><USER10> This paper describes a sunshade launched from a large expendable rocket of current technology

[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/16878140177192...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1687814017719227)

The $60T is my number based on the guess that the Long March 5 costs about the same as similar western rockets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kapton is something you've probably seen if you've opened up a laptop. It's the most typical material used for flexible pcbs: [https://raypcb.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/35e7d51a831f15...](https://raypcb.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/35e7d51a831f153.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER14> The article describes numerous crashes associated with Kapton, beginning with a story about a passenger plane where hundreds perished. It also mentioned a short circuit on the launch of the Columbia Space Shuttle, and military planes.

When used as an insulator where it can rub or be exposed to moisture: you're going to have a failure at some point. What's alarming then, was the conclusion:

> Still, hundreds of planes take off and land every day with Kapton insulated > wires routed through every nook and cranny, some almost impossible to reach > for inspection. And even when wire bundles are accessible, inspection comes > down to a flashlight and a Mark I eyeball, looking for that cracks that > might be lurking.

<comment><USER15> > inspection comes down to a flashlight and a Mark I eyeball, looking for that > cracks that might be lurking.

Where is our reassurance that everything is OK now??

<comment><USER16> I don't know if such things are used on passenger aircraft, but I've heard that fighter jets use time domain reflectometry to detect potential faults in wires, and how far along the wire the fault lies. Even a small nick in the insulation is supposed to change the impedance enough to create a detectable reflection.

At least some gigabit ethernet interfaces have built in weaker TDR that measures the length of each twisted pair, but I've only ever had one computer that showed that info in the BIOS/UEFI.

So, maybe if TDR is used for inspection, we can rest assured.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately I don't think TDR would help here: the issue isn't gross damage to the metal of the wires, it's subtle damage to the insulation.

<comment><USER16> From my prior comment: "Even a small nick in the insulation is supposed to change the impedance enough to create a detectable reflection."

This is what I was told by the person who saw the demo. I believe them, because it'd just be a matter of sending an impulse (or sweeping a tone) and looking at all of the spikes in the impulse response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's also used as a tape. Very, very handy to hold down parts & wires when soldering, since you can get it right next to the iron and not have any melting/burning issues (with most electronics solders).

</comment><comment><USER19> >"Studies showed that Kapton was far from the ideal insulator everyone had hoped it would be — it tended to develop circumferential cracks from the slightest of nicks, exposing the conductors within. Kapton is also easily degraded by moisture, exacerbating the problem in humid environments or areas of an aircraft subject to moisture, like galleys and lavatories.

Once the insulation is compromised, arcing can occur, which leads to charring of the Kapton. This changes the insulation's dielectric properties, turning it into a conductor. In some cases, this led to overloaded circuits that were not detected by circuit breakers, since the insulation was carrying the excess current rather than the conductor."

[...]

>"Planes built since then generally use TKT, which is Kapton with two thin layers of Teflon to provide better resistance to mechanical abrasion and water intrusion."

PDS: TKT sounds like a much better material, from a material science perspective...

</comment><comment><USER20> Also commonly used as vacuum window in X-ray facilities/setups. Probably one of the best ratio mechanical resistance / low absorption over a large energy range.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Mark 1 Eyeball

Gonna have to remember that one

<comment> mark-r Good luck with your Mark 1 Brain.

<comment><USER22> Mark I brains suffice to make incised graffiti. Although the data density is pitiful, the observed retention lifetimes beat tape storage.

(At a stretch, eyeballs might be Mark I, as they obviously haven't yet been patched to move that interconnect bundle out of the high-res region. Brains have enough legacy layers that they're probably Mark V at least...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was a huge car audio nerd in the late 1980s/early 1990s. One bullet point you could expect to see on most subwoofer spec sheets was 'KAPTON' voice coil former. I often wondered why that fell out of favor, but it seems that we know the answer... Most kilowatt subwoofers now use aluminum or copper voice coil forms for what I can only guess is that they are just better...

<comment><USER24> Kapton was an improvement over paper and phenolic, due to higher heat resistance. It's still widely used, e.g., in musical instrument speakers. I could see how aluminum and copper could be further steps along a similar progression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps the solution is to go to optical fibers, and just have a small number of power cables with better insulation.

</comment><comment><USER26> Kapton is an outstanding substrate material for flexible printed circuits. It has one of the lower dielectric loss tangents available, and this becomes important in RF and microwave applications. However, PTFE is better.

</comment><comment><USER27> Kapton is also inside many nuke plants in the US, too. What could possibly go wrong?</comment>


FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://www.freenas.org/ <comment><USER3> A FreeNAS device has the ability to do _native_ ZFS send/recv to rsync.net.[1]

Always remember to ask about the "HN Readers Discount".

[1] [http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html](http://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html)

[2] [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/12/rsync-...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/12/rsync-net-zfs-replication-to-the-cloud-is-finally-here-and- its-fast/)

<comment><USER4> Is there any way to use this and encrypt your data?

<comment><USER5> I don't know if it's possible with FreeNAS, but on an ordinary Debian box nothing stops you running ZFS on LUKS encrypted devices. I've been using this configuration without issues for about a year on a home file server.

<comment><USER6> That won't do anything when it comes to encrypted sends. ZFS supports disk encryption without a hitch.

I wouldn't recommend using LUKS, though - leave it to the built-in support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Storage is a really weak area of mine, but it is important, and I do not see much technical discussion here anyway, so I am going to expose myself:

How does integrity protection work in practice? I know that the bits on the HDD itself do not map one to one to bits you can actually use and that it uses that to protect us from flipped bits.

I know that beyond that RAID/RAIDZ is supposed to help. I guess redundancy alone does not help. Two copies would not help to determine which bit is the correct one, you would need three. Once you have these, I guess you would be able to detect corruption. Am I guessing correct that duplication beyond 3 times would just help with read speed and in the case when a drive fails while one is already dead (e.g. when you are rebuilding)?

What then? Does RAID/ZFS automatically fix it? I imagine at some point the drive would have to be replaced, do you have to check that manually or does it detect that by itself? I imagine after that you would have to run a rebuild.

So I guess my question would be: Could I put a FreeNas in a corner a room and leave it there? Would it just blink when I need to put a new drive in or would it need more maintenance? Of course talking about worst case scenarios here, so say I want this to live for 10 years sitting in the corner.

<comment><USER8> RAID generally does not protect against bit-rot (i.e. undetected errors); it only protects against detectable errors / catastrophic disk failure.

ZFS does protect against undetected (at the disk level) errors. To a first approximation, it does this by keeping block checksums alongside pointers so that it can verify that a block has not been changed since it was referenced, by keeping multiple checksummed root blocks, and by having enough redundancy to reconstruct blocks that fail their checksums. Naturally, there are information-theoretical limits to the number of corruptions that may occur for detection/correction to be guaranteed.

You should refer to the relevant wikipedia pages if you want more detail than that :p

edit: To answer your actual question, yes, you should be able to leave a ZFS box in the corner unattended for years with reasonable confidence that your data is safe and uncorrupted (tune redundancy settings to your taste on the space efficiency vs. error tolerance trade-off). Two caveats: 1) the machine must have an effective means of communicating a catastrophic disk failure for you to resolve (this should hold for any made-for-purpose NAS device, but you'll need to do some work if you're DIY). 2) ZFS does not actively patrol for corruptions, it fixes problems when it encounters them. If your data is not being periodically accessed, there will need to be some provision for walking the filesystem and correcting any accumulated errors (the ZFS scrub util exists for this purpose, but it has to be used)

<comment><USER7> > Naturally, there are information-theoretical limits to the number of > corruptions that may occur for detection/correction to be guaranteed.

To my practical point: Does it tell me, when it approaches that limit or do I have to put in more maintenance? Can it be fixed by swapping one of the drives?

<comment><USER3> If you are using ZFS, the flipped bit (or "bit rot") problem is completely solved. You need never give it another thought.

You still need to worry about failing drives and about the integrity of your raidz arrays (or whatever), but that has nothing to do with the flipping bits.

That being said, you _can_ see statistics about error corrections (which should typically be near-zero) and if you see a lot of them it might be advanced warning of a drive dying. But the actual bit errors themselves would not be a problem and you would not need to take any action specifically related to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ooh, these FreeNAS boxes for the home are very nice: [https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/](https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas- mini/)

When I built my home NAS there wasn't an off the shelf FreeNAS option and it was definitely a "research all the things, build your own system" with the huge caveat of "Did you put enough RAM in that?".

The 8-bay one is particularly good value, rivalling similar systems by QNAP, and I personally do have a QNAP and if I were to buy again today it would definitely be one of these FreeNAS boxes instead.

<comment><USER3> I think the generation 8 "HP Microserver" is a good system.

One limitation is the 16GB max ram, but given that it's for home use with (presumably) large files and a small number of simultaneous clients, it shouldn't be a problem - even if you use 4x 8 TB disks.

The key is to populate it with ECC ram which should be an absolute requirement for any ZFS system.

<comment><USER10> A quick google search brings up [0] telling ECC RAM is just as necessary as it is for another filesystem.

[0]: [http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill- yo...](http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Or if you want a linux flavored version: [http://www.openmediavault.org](http://www.openmediavault.org)

<comment><USER12> I was just about to post this. I run OMV at home, and haven't had any problems with it.

I've used both FreeNAS and OMV, and find the OMV community more welcoming and helpful than the FreeNAS one. The FreeNAS community has organized itself with the intent of focusing exclusively on very specific very corporate use case. If you don't fit they're use case, you are bad and should feel bad. OMV on the other hand is much more open and willing to help people use adapt it to their own needs.

With the notable exception of ZFS vs EXT4, they underlying software appears to be the same, which makes the community distinction every more cogent.

<comment><USER13> > With the notable exception of ZFS vs EXT4, they underlying software appears > to be the same,

Huh no. OMV is Linux + PHP.

<comment><USER14> That's correct, what is used on freenas for its GUI? never used freenas yet.

<comment><USER15> I believe it's Django

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FreeNAS has worked well for me for two years on a dedicated home NAS server I built with a mini-ITX motherboard. I chose DIY NAS over a NAS appliance like Synology's, because I can readily obtain a replacement for any hardware that fails into the indefinite future.

I keep a copy of the FreeNAS's storage on a second DIY NAS running NAS4free, which is the original base from which FreeNAS was forked some years ago.

One popular thing I don't do with my NAS boxes is run any non-NAS services e.g. media streaming, etc. For me it feels like an unnecessary risk to important data.

<comment><USER17> Not to mention, the jails system in FreeNAS has been in flux in the past. It never quite worked well for me, so offloading the "app" stuff to a workhorse is what I did.

<comment><USER18> I believe they are replacing jails with docker containers.

<comment><USER19> Both docker containers and bhyve VMs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another open source option is Synology's Disk Station Manager which includes a bunch of open source software they've skinned and created mobile apps for so you can localize stuff like music streaming, dropbox, notes etc - [https://www.synology.com/en- global/dsm/live_demo](https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/live_demo)

<comment><USER21> Can you run DSM on non-synology hardware?

<comment><USER22> Supposedly Xpenology[0] lets you do that. I have not used it personally, as I have actual Synology hardware.

[0] [http://xpenology.org/](http://xpenology.org/)

<comment><USER23> Yes, on x86 systems it mimics a DS3615. I've seen it installed on cheap dell desktops, like an optiplex 755.

Works well, with some limitations. I dont think their automatic port forwarding service (quickconnect) works well - since that service checks for a valid Synology MAC address.

Additionally - you can't do the automatic system updates as it might break certain portions that XPEnology overrides.

<comment><USER24> There is a serial number / MAC generator that makes quick connect work just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Although I don't think I'd ever DIY another NAS box, I would suggest the following, use a common chipset controller that exposes each drive/device separately with all information, some don't. Also, prefer a system with ECC, Asus supports ECC on most AMD FX supporting motherboards for the less expensive option there. Also, have 2 spare drives on hand.

I went back to Synology after my uper-nas crashed and burned (really bad run of 3TB Seagate drives, 9 out of 12 dead in under 3 years)... Now debating between a 4x8TB or 5x6tb in a future nas box.

<comment><USER26> I wanted to do something like this, but after reading about the failure rates of drives and raid, once one disk fails, it seems like you're fucked. Anybody got some stories or numbers that prove that while repairing my raid for one disk failure I won't just destroy the rest of my drives?

<comment><USER27> > I wanted to do something like this, but after reading about the failure > rates of drives and raid, once one disk fails, it seems like you're fucked. > Anybody got some stories or numbers that prove that while repairing my raid > for one disk failure I won't just destroy the rest of my drives?

Yeah, I've recovered several failed drives without issue, even on LVM systems where some partitions failed because they were striped but others worked because they were mirrored. No real issues overall.

The only case where you might run into problems is when you get conflicting data between 2 drives, but I've never seen that happen in the real world. Some people will scare you into thinking that happens often but it hasn't been my experience. Often one drive just goes kaput completely or has an entire section which is completely unreadable or extremely slow, for which recovery is just a matter of marking that drive offline, swapping a new drive in and telling it to rebuild. The only case in which you lose everything is if you use RAID0. If you can do RAID10 that's the way to go IMO.

RAID5 can be a little riskier because if one drive is damaged and one fails then you can wind up losing the bunch, but I use it on my personal NAS because it's mostly just TV and the important stuff is syncthing'd to my other machines. Regular scrubbing prevents these issues usually.

<comment><USER28> RAID6 is pretty safe. If you're using ZFS that's a RAIDZ2, you can lose 2 drives in a volume.

RAID5 can be pretty risky with large drives that are the same type.

>conflicting data between 2 drives, but I've never seen that happen in the real world

Heh, run enough servers and you'll see everything eventually. Had a really fun one where a hardware raid card was telling us that writes were successful, but when data was coming back corrupt. It was writing bad data to two of the drives in the array.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Correct me if I'm wrong (please!) but FreeNAS still can't (easily?) do what Synology's 'Hybrid RAID' (basically sharded RAID across drives) facilitates; growing your (redundant, e.g. 1 or more parity drives) volume by adding more drives, and also growing your volume by replacing drives with larger ones.

I've always thought that was essential, it bemuses me that there aren't many solutions out there that help you do this. I guess everyone must buy have loads of disposable income to buy 8 drives at once.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure about FreeNAS, but I do want to point out this is possible in the btrfs filesystem (sharded raid across drives). I'm not aware of any FreeNAS equivalents though utilizing it, but rolling your own is certainly an option.

<comment><USER31> RockStor is a Linux/btrfs equivalent to FreeNAS - I've been running it for a few months and have been pretty happy overall.

[http://rockstor.com/](http://rockstor.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I ran FreeNAS for a couple years. It's tremendously nice, and what I recommend for nearly anyone who want to have a personal cloud.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been using Unraid for a few months. It has a different - <USER2> inferior - parity strategy but has amazing support for VMs. I've got my gaming machine, my GPU dev box and a bunch of smaller services all in the same box and can do some really sweet online configuration.

<comment><USER27> How is it for gaming? I'd imagine it's using a VM solution (Xen HVM or KVM so it can do IOMMU?). I've been avoiding it because I figure that VM solution would get detected by anti-cheat in many games (particularly the nasty kernel level ones like EasyAntiCheat, GameGuard, etc).

<comment><USER33> I have 8x2.8 ghz Xeon cores 32 GB of RAM and a 970 GTX in my gaming vm. Works perfectly for DOOM, Witcher 3, all at 1920x1080 on high settings (maybe not full but damn pretty). Consensus on the forum seems to be you lose low single digit performance.

It's a KVM hypervisor and I haven't played online, why would they ban you for using a VM?

<comment><USER27> A VM makes it possible to arbitrarily read and modify memory from outside of the operating system in a way that the anti-cheat can't otherwise detect (heck, some VMs have full out integrated debuggers), so anti-cheat and DRM schemes used by games may disallow VMs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting... Just last week I started building a much simpler/smaller setup based also on ZFS for personal use:

\- rpi 3 (running debian testing) \- 2x1Tb disks (with usb docking) \- zfs (raidz) on the disks \- ssh through tor for tunneling purposes

I can backup my personal computers and run some extra stuff on the rpi. Yes, it's only USB2, but I don't care. I mostly send incremental snapshots from my computer and it's fast enough. (e.g. zfs send -i yesterday home/user@today | ssh rpi zfs recv home/user)

I'm tempted on building a small recv server that can allow partial transfers, but so far it works for me. Also, as soon as encryption is enabled on zfs- linux, I'm turning that on :)

Total budget: ~$180 (the most expensive part were obviously the HDDs)

<comment><USER35> AFAIK, the Raspberry Pi's put their ethernet on the USB bus. That's a huge downside to using a Raspberry Pi as a NAS solution.

<comment><USER34> that's true. But as I said before, I'm not after speed or actually using this a NAS, more like a backup server (where I can ~send~ my zfs snapshots).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> These offerings work well as a pure NAS - your data is backed up and available.

Where they fall down for me as a home user is in their inability to offer other services. For example, photo sharing. I have a fast home internet connection and all my photos are already on the NAS. But the photo sharing capabilities are very, very weak; so inevitably I have to use another service (ie Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr) if I want to make those photos available to myself and others while away.

The same goes for other forms of media sharing, self-hosted email, etc.. The boxes offer these things - and the appeal is obvious to the end-user - but the potency is so weak as to be essentially unusable.

</comment><comment><USER37> Time to donate to FreeBSD [https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/](https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/) !

</comment><comment><USER38> I run FreeNAS on a HP Microserver, got 4 3TB HGST drives, and a stick of ECC memory to bump the box to 10GB.

Given that the OS needs to run somewhere, and one would rather use the 4 bays for drives in the zpool, I used the recommended method of running the OS from a USB drive. Sounded strange to me, but it's worked a treat. I saw that there are kits out there for replacing the empty CD slot in the Microserver with an SSD for the same purpose, but I'd rather not touch something that's working now.

I went for RAIDZ1, despite a lot of internet protestations about it, as I basically only store movies/music/Time Machine backup there anyway.

Been thinking about backup solutions for everything, but it all seems fairly expensive for what is essentially just backing up media.

To people recommending Plex for media streaming, I would actually recommend Serviio over it. It took a little extra setup in a jail, requiring some extra port downloads, but it works extremely well in it's DLNA streaming to my PS3. Where it shone brighter than Plex for me was it's support for transcoding and subtitles - it transcodes and shows all of my H264 video files with ASS subtitles with all of the style intact. It also supported PGS subtitles, but my piddling processor didn't quite match up to it.

<comment><USER39> Off topic and a total tangent, but... Oh well!

Plex has done transcoding, including subtitle burn in, for a LONG time. It's a modified (I think) ffmpeg they ship with the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's funny that we've come so far in computing and yet reliable data storage is still such an unsolved problem for 99.9% of the world's consumers.

All the major solutions have their drawbacks. For example, btrfs' present day raid code is in such bad shape that apparently it needs a total rewrite. zfs' volumes can't grow without a resliver, which is not something a home user should ever have to do.

From a design perspective, the internals of both btrfs and zfs are only accessible to experts and totally opaque to their users. I've long thought someone could come along and write a FUSE-based distributed storage layer that sat on top of existing file system abstractions like ext4, etc. And that a system built that way could just crush both of those solutions in almost every conceivable way. I've toyed with writing it myself.

This approach might not be the fastest, but it would be the most flexible, possibly very reliable, and as a bonus it would be really easy for average users to grok and maximize their data recovery from all but the most catastrophic events.

<comment><USER41> "Reliable data storage" is easy. Engrave the data into a metal plate, or chisel it into rocks. It's when you start adding things like "huge amounts of data" and "readable by computer" and "able to stream in real-time" and "interoperate with multiple devices" and "fits in your hand" and and and...

Hyperbole, yes, but the point is that the devil is in the details, and there's a _hell_ of a lot of caveats to the term "reliable data storage". For example, in the modern era, if someone had a way to make ye olde floppy disks 100% reliable for 10 decades, they still wouldn't be used by that 99.9%, simply due to the low data capacity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> One thing that's been unclear to me with ZFS: How should I design a ZFS-based storage system for extensibility? From what I've read, it seems like you can't add devices to a pool once it's been created. I'd love to create a small-ish NAS right now to store, say, the top 10% of my blu-ray collection, and then incrementally upgrade it over time as I get funds.

<comment><USER43> The easiest way to do this is to use mirror vdevs, that way you can add disks two at a time. Of course, you miss out on RAIDZ functionality that way, but that's the simplest setup.

I've gone ahead and actually created a new array using btrfs raid10 instead (with an eye towards a RAIDZ2/3 like configuration whenever the btrfs guys get around to fixing it); btrfs allows for online reshaping of the mirroring configuration, so it doesn't have the limitations of ZFS in this instance.

<comment><USER42> Can you do btrfs with FreeNAS? I didn't think that was available.

<comment><USER44> If you could, that makes no sense. ZFS is superior.

<comment><USER45> Unless you want to reshape your array. Then md-raid is superior. Btrfs's raid implementation has had some pretty bad issues recently and has been declared "experimental" as a result.

<comment><USER43> This is inaccurate. Raid56 have _always_ been labeled experimental, but recently, data corruption bugs were found which make it dangerous to use.

Other raid levels (raid0, raid1, raid10) work fine and are considered stable -- at least as stable as the filesystem itself.

Either way, if you care about the data, you must backup, no matter what fs you use.

<comment><USER45> Apologies, I only saw the recent mailing list post which basically said "we're removing the ability to even compile support for raid56". I didn't mean to say that btrfs was overly-zealous in their trust of new code (I personally am super excited for the future of btrfs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> _Once you go ZFS, you will never want to go back._

True 'dat!

<comment><USER47> Once you go _unison_ you will never want to go back.

I even run some ZFS without ECC memory, because if hardware goes bad and programmatically corrupts it isn't the end of the world.

<comment><USER46> What is "unison"?

<comment><USER47> Bidirectional file synchronization. It makes any single replica not that important.

Don't concentrate your resources into a single "invincible" box.

<comment><USER46> Is the synchronization synchronous or asynchronous?

Is there a uniform resource identifier where I could read more about it? Or perhaps some book? Research paper?

<comment><USER47> [https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/](https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/)

It synchronizes directory trees on arbitrary filesystems, so I think the answer to your question would be "asynchronous".

Most individuals don't have TBs of working set continually being updated and requiring a central authoritative copy. They have a small working set and a long-term archive they'd just never want to lose.

Unison's model isn't perfect (eg having to create a star topology, lack of built-in inotify). But it's been around forever, is written in a sane language, and is rock solid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have bad memories of freenas (before the split/new version) many years ago when I had a disk and power failure... hdb went, so, c/d moved up a letter and it automatically screwed up raid...

... I was able to recover, but, I remember how many hours I spent on it.

Please tell me it is better now?

<comment><USER49> it's ZFS backed, screwing up the RAID is going to be pretty close to impossible.

you _can_ lose the system disk (usb key) that holds your settings, but the data you actually care about will be safe.

<comment><USER50> I used ZFS in two production instances a few years ago on Solaris, and had two instances of a bug that totally corrupted the superblock on each drive, meaning that all data was gone with no way to recover.

Now I'm back to HW RAID, LVM, and ext4, which works a treat, and I'll be using that until I have more faith in ZFS.

<comment><USER51> You had incredibly bad luck then unless you weren't running Solaris on Sun hardware, in which case you may have shot yourself in the foot with a poor disk controller and/or no ECC.

<comment><USER49> Sun hardware is expensive junk, but a bad disk controller that lies to ZFS about sync status is definitely in the risk model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I have been using FreeNAS for a few years now. It has been great for me, both as a backup and a Plex server. I am really excited for 10.0 when it will have docker support instead of the current jails. It will be much better for some random tinkering too.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is probably a really stupid question, but for what kinds of applications or scenarios are people using FreeNAS? I'm interested in hearing about regular users, not business or enterprises.

Upon seeing FreeNAS Mini, I have to say that I'm really interested. I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of keeping all of my data "in the cloud". Being able to keep a local version of all my media would help give me peace of mind.

Is maintaining your own "personal cloud", if you will, a reasonable use-case for this? What are the proper expectations from a maintenance perspective? i.e. How often should I expect things to break or require tuning / fixing?

<comment><USER54> I use FreeBSD+ZFS rather than FreeNAS, but it's the same idea. I store all of my photos and videos, all of my music, and all of my movies. The music and movies are served via Plex and Sonos to various parts of the house, and I use Lightroom to browse the photos.

This is not the only copy of any of this stuff, though. The photos get synced to S3 and backed up on a second local hard drive. All of the movies I have are rips of DVDs and Blu-Rays I still own, and can use if needed. And my music is all in Apple Music/iTunes Match (and on my computer, backed up via both Time Machine and Crashplan).

So, I'm using the server really as convenient local storage for stuff, not as an alternative to the cloud.

<comment><USER55> How are you accessing the photos? NFS? SMB? Is the performance decent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I do love FreeNAS, at home and at the office too (for development purposes - I'd trust it for production but with our client base it's better to be more "corporate").

It has a good cross section of features from 'home' to 'pro', AFP/NFS/CIFS/iSCSI, directory integration, plugins (more aimed at home, with things like news downloaders, BT clients).

<comment><USER57> What do you use instead of zfs in production?

<comment><USER56> The latest we've bought is a Dell SCv2020 SAN appliance that provides iSCSI to our VMware server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I never really understood the system requirements for FreeNAS. It would be something that would work great on some small old system, but at 8gb Recommended the system requirements is basically the opposite of a small old system.

Can anyone explain the reason for this? What makes the specs so hardcore?

<comment><USER59> It's just a recommendation. Remember, some people use FreeNAS professionally, so they're going to err on the side of recommending too much (= enterprise). Less will probably work fine, as long as you aren't running dedupe, compression, or heaps of jails and services. E.g. if you have 4 drives and just use the SMB service to connect to one or two machines, 4GiB is probably okay.

Having said that, RAM is pretty cheap. 8GiB isn't a huge ask for any machine in 2016. Any system with less than 4GiB, is it really worth bothering with redundancy/ZFS? UFS (which is far less RAM hungry) + nightly backups might be good enough. (Edit: of course, you miss out on the awesome ZFS features with UFS. It's never easy, is it?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> When looking for a professional storage solution, I found FreeNAS, but then noticed that I was looking for something more distributed and robust.

I found Ceph. Also 100% opensource. But needs like 3 physical machines in production (at least) in order to have some kind of built-in redundancy.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think NASes should become the things of the past. They are too fragile, too maintenance-greedy and don't scale enough for the modern world. I'd much rather see a tiny distro with ready to use Swift, Gluster, Ceph, whatever, but not ZFS (sorry ZFS fans).

<comment><USER62> So let me get this straight: running a cluster of swift/gluster/ceph is less maintenance greedy than a single box?

<comment><USER61> Than a single traditional NAS box, yes.

EDIT: Let me explain a bit more: once you start running a distributed system you stop caring about OS, filesystem and disk level issues, because you have redundancy on another level. And it makes all the difference. You don't worry anymore, you can always just reboot, hard-reset or take a node out to investigate. Suddenly you realize that it's not a big deal even if some node starts freezing or some process starts OOMing and crashing, you don't care, you just let them.

<comment><USER63> If dont want to care for the OS, who do you expect to keep it in check? Someone has to worry about it: you can try and abstract it away and minimize it but its never gone.

I see this line of thought that somehow self-hosted "clouds"/clusters look after themselves, but thats usually not the case.

You'd come close by buying QNAP or Synology hardware, they provide software updates (including OS). Even buying software solutions like Unraid. I dont know how maintainable FreeNAS is for someone who doesnt want to worry about OS tho..

<comment><USER61> > I see this line of thought that somehow self-hosted "clouds"/clusters look > after themselves, but thats usually not the case.

They don't really look after themselves, but do handle failures on the highest possible level. Which makes it unnecessary to keep each OS in check. What's critical for a single NAS box is critical for a distributed storage only if all boxes of some replica have the same problem at the exact same time, otherwise you just reboot and move on and it doesn't matter if it happens again, it doesn't cause any downtime.

I actually speak from my own experience. I run and maintain a distributed key- value storage for many years. Although I designed and implemented it myself (and redesigned a bunch of times), I don't see how experience with those other distributed storages, like Swift, would be any different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I use NAS4Free which is similar, on an HP Microserver N54L (it has ECC RAM) in a RAID-Z1 configuration and a cron job set up to zfs-scrub the drives monthly. If you're going to DIY a NAS, I can heartily recommend both NAS4Free and the HP Microserver.

</comment><comment><USER65> ZFS runs with even better performance when you turn compression on. zfs set compression=lz4

<comment><USER66> I noticed a massive write performance hit when I enabled this. Note that it'll only compress data after you enable it, it isn't retroactive

<comment><USER65> CPU is most likely the bottle neck. So my comment should have read if you have a fast cpu you may benefit from ZFS compression.

On modern CPU LZ4 should enable about 400MB/s current PCU write compression [https://github.com/Cyan4973/lz4](https://github.com/Cyan4973/lz4)

<comment><USER66> Thank you for that - it was interesting at least, even if I've probably done it all wrong (TLDR - compression on ZFS definitely varies with the data you try to compress)

[https://blog.voltagex.org/2016/08/26/benchmarking- compressio...](https://blog.voltagex.org/2016/08/26/benchmarking-compression- on-freebsd/)

Fun fact: while researching this I found yet another article that contradicts the information I had when I built my zpool, and apparently I've done it all wrong (again).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It is worth noticing the Active Directory integration is not yet ready.

[https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/16966](https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/16966)

<comment><USER51> Let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is only indicating that they aren't exposing any query filters in the GUI and searching for all objects from the root is overwhelming the GUI if you have a large AD environment.

Rookie mistake, but a simple patch solves it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> May as well ignore the "RAID is dead" screams. They are only FUD. Do make sure to run the scrub periodically though, that's the real defense against rebuild failures.

</comment><comment><USER68> NAS4Free > FreeNAS.

Start your flamewars nerds!

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

I actually have only used Nas4Free. I know that FreeNAS is technically the fork (despite having the original name), but the technology IMO is quite solid.

Its important to know all of the competition however. Here's a basic overview of the technologies:

* Nas4Free -- ZFS-based. Free as in beer and Free as in OSS. More barebones and simple than FreeNAS. As it is based on FreeBSD, you need to be somewhat careful about hardware choices, although in my experience FreeBSD seems to support hardware that I'm interested in.

* FreeNAS -- ZFS-based. Forked from Nas4Free and name-shenanigans happened. Newer web-gui and more plugins. Can't speak too much about it, since I haven't played with it.

\</comment><comment>-

* Windows Storage Spaces -- Windows8 and up have ReFS + Storage Spaces as their ZFS-competitor. Runs a daemon in the background to automatically check for bitrot (unlike NAS4Free / FreeNAS where you need to schedule a cronjob). Comes as part of Windows, if building a dedicated system you need to pay the $100 Windows Tax. Best hardware compatibility available. No head-scratching about random AMD A10 / FM2+ motherboards with obscure drivers (FM2+ compatibility is not listed on FreeBSD yet)... you know everything has Windows compatibility.

Windows Storage Spaces are superior technologically to ZFS IMO. You can extend a storage space after building it, while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size. (You can add more drives to a ZFS mirror, but this only increases reliability). Start with 2-hard drives and then extend the storage space to 6-drives later.

You can stripe data to increase a ZFS pool size, but this doesn't keep the same level of reliability. The Windows Storage Space methodology where you overpromise on storage size (and then later build out capacity) just seems to be an easier methodology to work with in the long term.

\</comment><comment>--

ZFS has more features, but nobody uses them. ZFS supports dedup, but all documentation I've seen says its not worth it.

I guess one important feature ZFS has is that it supports L2ARC / ARC caching for SSD Acceleration.

Windows ReFS does not. ReFS is also not a complete solution. Parity is implemented at the "Storage Space" level, not at the filesystem level. I don't think this is a major downside, but it is important to note that ReFS + Storage Spaces is the complete solution. (Whereas ZFS stands alone)

Note: Snapshots (Called 'Shadow Copies' in Windows land) exist on NTFS.

\</comment><comment>--

* Synology -- Out-of-the box systems, usually built on Intel Atom. I find that the 2-disk options are cheap, but the 4-bay or 6-bay options are outrageously expensive. I can definitely build a cheaper WINDOWS system than most 4-bay Synology Box.

Synology is mostly a soft-RAID setup. I don't see much on bitrot or other storage issues. I hope they handle it? But I'm not 100% sure.

<comment><USER28> >I guess one important feature ZFS has is that it supports L2ARC / ARC caching for SSD Acceleration.

Which can massively accelerate small file load times. Using this on a VM pool greatly speeds things up.

>Also ZFS has compression which can drastically reduce data usage.

Which in some virtual environments decreased our data usage by 50 times or more.

Windows storage spaces suck balls on speed. Using it in the Microsoft recommend methods to avoid data loss or corruption make it even slower.

Oh, and just throwing files on ReFS and using it directly with services and such is a great way to get weird issues if you don't understand the filesystem are different.

>while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size

Specific number of disks. You increase the disks size and you can grow you raid.

<comment><USER68> > Which can massively accelerate small file load times. Using this on a VM > pool greatly speeds things up.

I did some research, and it appears that Microsoft has added "SSD Tiers" to Storage Spaces. I didn't realize Microsoft had that feature!

> Specific number of disks. You increase the disks size and you can grow you > raid.

Yeah. Except my disks don't grow in size. I can have a Storage Space composed of 1TB drives. And then add 2TB drives next year.

Its a nifty trick, and definitely is a smoother transition than ZFS "replace everything" methodology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Obligatory post complaining about the weird janky scrolling...

</comment><comment><USER70> Are there any Consumer NAS using FreeNAS?

</comment><comment><USER71> Has anyone managed to unlock the Synology bootloader? Their hardware is great (but expensive), but the software leaves a lot to be desired.

</comment><comment><USER72> Warning: there is a well documented bug with the FreeNAS boot loader's interaction with Dell PowerEdge servers. Be prepared to spend hours getting it to install if that's your hardware.

</comment><comment><USER73> I've heard rumors about ZFS being really slow on mounts of very large filesystems.

I've also heard that it is a black hole from which CPU time and RAM enter, and do not emerge.

Is this true, and if so, to what degree?</comment>


Ask YC: Missed Opportunites at YC - <AUTHOR>

Everyone knows that Reddit was a really successful Y Combinator Start Up.
Does anyone know of any companies that are really successful that applied, but were not accepted to Y Combinator?
It seems every VC has one, since Y Combinator makes its decisions before the product is built, one would imagine their job would be tougher.
Any insight? <comment><USER2> I don't know of any so far. There are bound to be eventually, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, unless you're hotmail or YouTube, it takes more than 2-3 years to be "really successful". YC has only been around for something like 3 years. Give it some time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What about other places such as TechCrunch 40?

<comment><USER4> <http://sleep.fm/>

<comment><USER3> I love the idea, but the site looks horrible in IE7 (lets not get into the reasons I'm using IE7 right now ...)

<comment><USER5> With all due respect to their work, I don't think that its an IE7 problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google applied to Y Combinator but was rejected.</comment>


WhatsApp group chats can be found on Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/whatsapp-google-group-chat-private-link-messages-search-public-a9354391.html <comment><USER2> The story has been submitted several times here on HN, but the community doesn't seem to care:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22386788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22386788) 9 comments;

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22397130](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22397130) 1 (content-free) comment;

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22389718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22389718) no comments;

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22386186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22386186) no comments;

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383487) no comments.

The consensus seems to be: Working as intended.

<comment><USER3> I find it hard to care, unless I've misunderstood it.

You post a group chat's invite link to a public web site, and then you wonder how Google finds it?

There's no chat content visible to Google, isn't it? It's just the invite link that "leaks" the group name or so?

<comment><USER2> I don't use WhatsApp[0] so I don't know how these things work. But here is a summary from the article:

> _People can create a group chat in WhatsApp;_

> _People can then be invited to join that;_

> _There is a reasonable expectation that only those invited can join;_

> _That turns out not to be the case;_

> _Group chats can be found via Google search;_

> _Random, uninvited people can then join;_

> _Those who were invited might find that surprising._

So the way WhatsApp is described, people might expect that their groups chats are invitation only and end-to-end encrypted. Personally, even though I don't use WhatsApp at all, I'd be _deeply_ annoyed to discover that a "private" group chat, joined through being sent an invitation, was potentially discoverable via a Google search and could be joined by people other than those to whom an invitation was sent.

I think non-technical people, and some technical people, will find it very surprising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

[0] I don't use WhatsApp because the terms of service require that I permit them to slurp my address book, and I have contact details for people who really don't want their details leaked.

<comment><USER3> I'm still unclear about who is posting the link:

WhatsApp itself, somewhere under whatsapp.com?

Or random users on whatever web sites, Facebook etc.?

If the latter (and that's how I understood it): if you give people an invite link, that link can be used to access the group. Obviously. Works as intended.

If you don't want random people to show up, don't post the link publicly, give it only to trusted people you actually want in the group.

<comment><USER2> As I say, I don't use WhatsApp, so I don't know. However, quoting from another report on this:

> _If you want to comb through Google Search to find out if your private > WhatsApp group is indexed, just start with a "chat.whatsapp.com" string and > then enter in some information specific to your chat. Vice did this and was > able to find several chat groups related to sharing porn as well as a chat > that describes itself as being for NGOs accredited by the United Nations. > These chat groups listed out members' names as well as contact information, > in some cases phone numbers._

\-- [https://www.androidauthority.com/private- whatsapp-1085998/](https://www.androidauthority.com/private-whatsapp-1085998/)

So I don't know who's sharing these links, or what the mechanism is for doing so, but I'm pretty sure people won't be expecting the groups to be found via a Google search. As such, whatever the mechanism may be, dismissing this as "Works as intended" seems to me to be breathtaking arrogance.

Your opinion may differ, but I think muggles would be surprised by this, and potentially it's only being kept in the dark about it that's stopping them from being very angry.

<comment><USER3> > dismissing this as "Works as intended" seems to me to be breathtaking > arrogance.

I really don't like your arrogant dismissal. I've tried to understand the issue, after three articles it's still unclear.

But let's step back for a second. How would you expect it to work? How could anyone else be at fault than the one posting the link on public web sites (and it doesn't look like it's WhatsApp).

Say, I'm posting a link to your LinkedIn profile here on Hacker News. How do you propose that LinkedIn(!) stops following other people that link to your profile?

Assuming you didn't want to have that posted, wouldn't you take umbrage with me? What mechanism do you expect WhatsApp to implement to make sure that

(a) a link can be followed by the right people, after sharing it publically

and (b) the link cannot be followed by the wrong people

and (c) the link is enough to enter the group, so no password, because that#s the whole point of that feature – and a password would be shared just alongside the link anyway.

<comment><USER2> Let me put it this way.

People tout WhatsApp as being secure, and yet when it's working allegedly as intended, people who have not been invited to join a group chat can nevertheless so so. Genuinely, do you not find that surprising?

You ask:

> _How would you expect it to work?_

I would expect it to work over secure channels, and not over links that can be discovered and indexed by Google.

Look, I don't have knowledge to debate this. I've mentioned it to several non- technical people I know who use WhatsApp and they genuinely are surprised. They thought it would be secure, they thought that creating private chat groups would be, you know, _private_.

As I've said repeatedly, I don't know how it works, I don't know where the muggles' expectations are deviating from those of the technically literate, but I do know that people are finding it surprising that their allegedly private groups chats are not, in fact, private.

Clearly your expectations are different.

But I'll stop now, since I'm failing so spectacularly to explain my concerns.

<comment><USER3> > I would expect it to work over secure channels, and not over links that can > be discovered and indexed by Google.

How on earth? The web and links are pretty much the only thing we have to point people towards internet services.

And I just checked, in the app, directly under the link, there is the following sentence: "Every WhatsApp user can follow this link to enter the group. Share it only with people you trust" (my translation, English wording probably differs).

> Look, I don't have time to debate this.

So instead of finding out what's happening (it's still not clear!), you'd rather use your time to FUD your friends and acquaintances.

> I've mentioned it to several non-technical people I know who use WhatsApp > and they are surprised.

Of course, if you coloured it with your opinion and speculation, like you did in this thread.

<comment><USER2> >> I've mentioned it to several non-technical people I know who use WhatsApp and they are surprised.

> Of course, if you coloured it with your opinion and speculation, like you > did in this thread.

So it's spreading FUD to tell them _the exact thing that 's there in the app?_ Pointing out that links to group chats have been found on Google searches is spreading FUD?

Pretty sure we must be starting from different premises, and that it's unlikely this will go anywhere. You've made it clear that you think it's reasonable for it to work the way it days, I've tried to make it clear that people are surprised that links to group chats are being found via web searches. I've also tried to make it clear that I think their level of surprise is reasonable.

Not sure there's much more to say.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>