Tesla Makes Offer to Acquire SolarCity - <AUTHOR> https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/tesla-makes-offer-to-acquire-solarcity <comment><USER2> Some people are questioning the reason behind this offer. Read between the lines here, folks. Musk has borrowed heavily to invest in SolarCity and Tesla, and with the ongoing rout in SolarCity shares he is facing a margin call:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/dealbook/tesla- so...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/business/dealbook/tesla-solarcity- elon-musk.html) "But the transaction highlights the unusual moves that Mr. Musk continues to make to support the various arms of his empire, where he is the largest shareholder of each company.

He has taken out loans to buy up shares in Tesla and SolarCity, some backed by his personal stock holdings in both companies — a risky move that leaves him exposed to margin calls if their stock prices slide too far."

And if there's a margin call, Musk has to sell a lot of his shares to cover, which imposes considerable risk on the stock price of his companies. From Tesla regulatory filings:

"Tesla has warned investors in U.S. regulatory filings what could happen if Musk had to sell the shares. "The forced sale of these shares pursuant to a margin call could cause our stock price to decline and negatively impact our business.""

This is just CYA for Musk, dressed up with happy talk about vertical integration and increasing synergy and such.

Edit: I completely forgot about the massive debt that SolarCity owes to SpaceX- all the more reason to prevent SolarCity from collapsing: [http://electrek.co/2016/03/22/elon-musk-spacex-solar- bonds-s...](http://electrek.co/2016/03/22/elon-musk-spacex-solar-bonds- solarcity/)

"Last year, SpaceX already purchased solar bonds from SolarCity on two separate occasions: another $90 million followed by $75 million. SpaceX's involvement in SolarCity's Solar Bond Program is set to total around $255 million"

<comment><USER3> Trying to read between lines, but it's not all that obvious to me what is going on. Considering Musk's history with big, risky, personal debts I would not discount the possibility that he is doing something like that here.

Tesla has been making seriously interesting progress in terms of products. It's far outside the norms of " disruptive tech" that we've gotten used to with the giant successes of the last decade or two (Google, Facebook, Uber...). To be Facebook or Uber, you need to put out your version of the software, be popular, lucky on your timing and (ideally) dig a network effect moat. There's a lot of risk, but not a lot of capital is involved.

Musk seems to love capital intensive ideas. There are definitely some advantages to it. Tesla doesn't worry about competition from proverbial college dorms. The competition they need to worry about is from the likes of Google (or maybe Uber in the future) or the major manufacturers. Neither seem like very strong competition. Tesla have ideas that require billions to try mostly to themselves.

Anyway, I wouldn't discount everything as corporate smoke screens and CYA. There is at least a decent chance this is what it sounds like. Tesla want a Solar arm. This purchase makes sense ...and it also lines up well in terms of converting debt-equity-risk-position-whatnot-intertwined-financial-magic.

<comment><USER2> It is important for a business to be thinking long-term. As we all know, that is Elon's real strength. But the financials of this deal make little sense to me and many investors view this decision as reckless. Tesla is a cash burning company- they had to do another large capital raise just last month. SolarCity is a cash burning company with considerable debt. When Tesla buys SolarCity they must fund the day to day cash burn and also assume SolarCity's multi- billion dollar long-term debt burden. With the Model 3 ramp-up Tesla already has massive cash requirements. SolarCity will add fuel to the cash bonfire.

<comment><USER3> I never know what to think when people bring up "investor concerns" in cases like this. I mean, I get that investors are owners. But, Tesla is public and the stocks (are there bonds?) are liquid. This company has both stated and demonstrated a big appetite for very high risk-reward. If investors don't like it, they can take their win and get out of Tesla.

This is (in some sense ;-) the opposite to the criticism in your earlier comment. Tesla is doing what Musk said they'd do, take lots of risk and try to lead a shift away from fossil fuel. So far we've seen a surprisingly good car and a very promising looking battery, some charging stations… Now he says he's adding solar, with it more risk and more potential. Damned as a liar if he's doing some financial engineering while talking visionary risk taking. Damned as a loose cannon if he does what he said before (presumably) you bought the stock and pursuing some massively risky vision.

I mean… hmmm… there are lots of companies you can invest in. One way they differ is in risk-reward potential. I think it works better if/when CEOs can decide on strategy and investors can decide to buy/sell shares. Catering to investors that want to hold but also to moderate the company's strategy encourages herding, averaging out of strategies.

I'm not an investor in Telsa so I guess I don't have a dog in the fight. But… I have to say I'm excited to see a CEO (seemingly) not driven by bad incentives take big risk. I think investors in Tesla should be the most risk tolerant ones.

<comment><USER4> Judging by the stock price today, I think that may be exactly what happened, but only just a bit. Stock is down 8%, some investors have decided to get out of tesla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some people think SolarCity is doing terribly because they're losing so much money. Actually them losing money is an incredibly great sign for the long run (assuming they don't run out of money - which Elon won't let happen).

Here's how their business model works:

\- They will install solar panels on your house for free (or cheaper than the full cost).

\- You pay them a much lower rate than what the public utility company charges for the electricity generated from those solar panels.

\- You save tens of thousands of dollars and lower your carbon footprint by hundreds of thousands of pounds of CO2 over 20-30 years.

\- They lose a ton of money installing those expensive panels but make a TON of money in the long run selling you that electricity that is generated for next to nothing.

So as you can see, SolarCity losing money is actually a good thing because it means they're making so many damn sales that in 10 years they're going to be reaping the profits from those sales like crazy.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, their business model and pricing is far from competitive in some areas of the United States. I inquired into their services, and when it came to pricing, they were at least 50% over the average of all service providers and plans, and in the bottom 10% as far as price per kw/h.

Also, the home owner has no ownership stakes in any of the hardware. That's great during the service period (10 years if I recall), where they maintain and manage the hardware. However, at the end of the term, you are offered to buy the equipment with a hefty baloon payment. To the point ehere you'd be better off and come out FAR ahead by paying out of pocket from the onset and own the equipment outright.

<comment><USER7> The buyers likely can't afford to outright buy. Being the cheapest isn't usually the best idea in business either. Apple does pretty well being much more expensive than the average.

<comment><USER8> I think the key here is batteries. The utilities will fight (lobby) to give themselves the upper hand when it comes to buying solar power from _consumers_. Tesla plans to make lots of batteries. Batteries also happen to be good solution to these legislative issues.

A match made in... the backroom?

It's not about brand at this point, it's about economies of scale and production?

<comment><USER9> This is an underrated observation.

Converting to metered grids (on which consumers can sell) costs a small fortune, often for very little benefit. Even environmentalists have been weighing in against it as wasteful.

Tesla's home battery solution offers an obvious response to this situation - you can minimize or avoid grid sell-off by doing in-home storage to smooth demand. That has the potential to make SolarCity an incomparable player in non-metered markets, keeping with Musk's general "no viable competitors" ethos.

<comment><USER10> Also, Tesla automobiles are giant batteries themselves. If you're looking at demand shifting, it's rarely a bad thing to have two days of storage capacity plugged in all night. I think that is where the true magic happens, converting non net metering markets to profitability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This could be an all time Machiavellian move just to punish the Solarcity shorts on Wall St., which include Jim Chanos and others. The after hours bump to SC is killing the shorts and that might be the point more so than the deal actually closing.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/solarcity-tesla-deal-short- in...](http://www.businessinsider.com/solarcity-tesla-deal-short- interest-2016-6)

<comment><USER12> It's very unlikely they would do something like this just to punish short- sellers.

Also, Tesla is also popular among short-sellers, and it dropped in value (which was expected), so it wouldn't make any sense to 'punish' short-sellers in SCTY only to 'reward' them in TSLA.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. They are going to corner the energy market with this move. Solar has arrived.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One simple way this could really help is just in naming. Tesla Energy is sure to turn more heads than SolarCity as Tesla is a household name now that people generally have good associations with. SolarCity always sounded a bit generic.

<comment><USER15> Where is Tesla a household name? I never have any exposure to Tesla other than on Reddit and HN. Even now I know little about the company and my main thought is "some new company making electric cars that sound expensive, have unknown longevity, unknown reliability, and unknown depreciation, and will be hard to service."

On the other hand, Solar City reps harangue me to buy their product every time I go to Home Depot, and I see their trucks all over the road. I have no favorable impression of them either--I think "if solar is so great, why isn't my utility doing it, and why would I sign a long-term contract with some dude who hangs out at Home Depot and harasses people." But I don't see "Tesla Energy" having some kind of excellent brand equity.

<comment><USER16> Tesla is a household name among everyone I know up and down the West Coast, and among every single car or motorcycle enthusiast I know.

But then, both your comments about Tesla and SolarCity seem to be feigning ignorance as a way to disguise your denigration. Hint: Solar (on-prem) is a way to deprive your electricity company of revenue, which is why they're not doing it.

Of course, they use it as some component of their electricity mix, and then bill you for it.

<comment><USER17> Utilities are under constant pressure to provision capacity to meet rising electric demand. If the on-premises Solar City model (front the cost of the system and installation in exchange for being able to sell the electricity produced) was proven they would be doing it. Building new generating capacity is hugely expensive and almost always a major political battle to get approved.

Many utilities are investing heavily in utility-scale solar and wind installations. But the reality is that on-premises solar is still a gamble. Nobody is yet making money at it, quite the contrary.

<comment><USER18> > If the on-premises Solar City model (front the cost of the system and > installation in exchange for being able to sell the electricity produced) > was proven they would be doing it.

No - this completely ignores the way the electric grid, generation, and distribution work. Just because 'utility solar' is more efficient for large scale generation, that doesn't mean it doesn't also make sense for individuals to be able to produce their own electricity.

My solar system has a break even point of 5.9 years - in another 3.4 years I will be pocketing several thousand dollars per year that would otherwise be going to PG&E. Doesn't sound like a gamble to me.

<comment><USER19> The question is, would you have had higher returns investing in a large-scale solar project?

I have achieved breakeven over buying some produce from the grocery store by growing it in my back yard, but that doesn't mean it's the future of agriculture. I guess it would help if the local Whole Foods were required to buy my excess lemons at the $1/each sticker price.

<comment><USER20> Growing your own produce is a net negative 'investment', even when you don't factor in the labor cost. On-premises solar starts making money after a few years (or today, depending on circumstances - I took out a subsidized loan to finance them, so no initial outlay, and had lower costs the day they were installed); centralized solar _might_ make (a few percent) more but you can't leverage, you don't have control over anything (CEO 200% salary hike? 'sure', says the board, 'we're paying a 10% dividend aren't we? That's huge by industry standards!'), and you run the risk of losing everything (whereas solar panels are on your roof and unlikely to be a total loss).

So very different risk profiles, hence very different risk/reward trade-offs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In retrospect I find this 3-days-old publication quite... amusing)) "... I [SC CEO and Musk cousin L. Rive] asked, 'Elon, hey can I have a family discount' and his answer is, 'Yeah absolutely. Go to TeslaMotor.com, buy the car online, and the price you see there is the family discount,'" Rive told Tech Insider. "Everyone gets a family discount."

So there you have it: Musk does not believe in preferential treatment for family members.

"I give Elon credit beyond the fact of being the best entrepreneur in the world — he treats everyone the same. Everyone. There's no nepotism at all," Rive said. [http://mobile.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-response-when- so...](http://mobile.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-response-when-solarcity- ceo-asked-for-tesla-discount-2016-6)

<comment><USER22> Supposedly he paid full price for his own cars too. Although I'm sure he can afford it without too many sacrifices.

<comment><USER23> Unless you own 100% of a company, it isn't really ethical to give yourself a discount or freebies. And wouldn't be legal unless handled correctly with the tax man.

<comment><USER22> Employee discounts are extremely common.

<comment><USER24> Elon is not an employee.

<comment><USER25> Elon is an employee of both Tesla and SpaceX. The discounts conversation was referring to Tesla vehicles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Elon is using a public traded company to save his other failing businesses. In a sense he already did this before using his private loans guaranteed by Tesla shares. But at least in that case it was his own money. Now he wants to use other shareholder's money to bailout his floundering solar energy investment.

<comment><USER27> It does seem like a direct conflict of interest. This will be interesting to watch if there are any challenges from the SEC.

<comment><USER28> The CEO is his cousin, but he has recused himself of voting on the deal. I doubt the SEC & FTC will care; Wall Street on the other hand, I think they all see what this is about.

<comment><USER29> Elon is the chairmen of both companies... It's definitely unusual.

<comment><USER28> I didn't say it wasn't unusual, just that the SEC and FTC likely won't bat an eye.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So two companies with great potential. One (Solar City) has a problem convincing investors and is exposed to wide fluctuations and the other (Tesla) is pretty good at managing expectation and enthusiasm in the market. So I guess the idea here is to limit exposure in one of them by absorbing it in another. Might work but goes counter intuitive to the idea that I always thought was the most important in Musk companies: Focus. Focus on delivering one main value. Hope this works out.

<comment><USER31> He's expanding the stack of technologies and resources he can directly control. First there was the car, but the car is only useful with good batteries, enough service stations, and cheap power. Step 1, open service stations and provide cheap power. Step 2, integrate the batteries so you can control production and reduce cost. Step 3, integrate power generation so you can control cost of that cheap power you are providing.

This is the equivalent of Ford buying Exxon (which already includes the service stations), and then offering cheaper gas to all Ford customers. Who doesn't think that would influence at least some people (or companies! Fleets of cars!)

<comment><USER32> > This is the equivalent of Ford buying Exxon

Henry Ford wasn't a founder of Exxon. Musk is a founder of SolarCity.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure how that's relevant. Musk being a founder of both companies doesn't magically make them different in what they are and do. The pieces of the pie in play are similar, if apportioned differently. They would combine to a similar whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Others have already made this point[1] but to me, SolarCity has some aspects that make it look like more of a of a tax-arbitrage business than a solar panel retail business. It reminds me a bit of the ethanol blending tax credit, which led, in some cases, to companies mixing ethanol with petrochemicals solely for the tax benefit.

[1] [http://www.newsmax.com/BradleyBlakeman/solar-kroll- subsidy/2...](http://www.newsmax.com/BradleyBlakeman/solar-kroll- subsidy/2015/10/12/id/695764/)

<comment><USER34> You are probably right but (1) SolarCity would be foolish as a business _not_ to take advantage of tax incentives (2) the primary purpose of these incentives in the first place should be exactly this - to encourage businesses like solarcity (3) over the long term of course the business model assumes panel prices reduce and become more efficient so the tax thing isnt required in the long term to prop them up

<comment><USER35> There's taking advantage of tax incentives, and then there's this:

"According to the Kroll report, SolarCity reports solar system costs when claiming tax credits that are 75 percent higher than solar system costs disclosed to investors in the company's quarterly investor earnings call."

<comment><USER36> That's a legal tax loop hole though, they are allowed to file based on retail prices they sell their panels for even though they buy them at wholesale bulk prices

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What a disaster. The purchase makes no real sense, unless you bend over backwards to try to force a rationalization. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea can't read a financial statement. Solar City as an investment is terrible, and even Goldman Sachs recently said they were one of the worst performing companies in the sector.

I'm expecting a ton of shareholder lawsuits at this point. The idea that Tesla was buying SCTY bonds is sketchy enough, the idea of buying the entire company is just insane.

<comment><USER5> Why is this a disaster?

Why doesn't the purchase make sense?

Why do you think I can't read a financial statement?

Why is SCTY a terrible investment?

Why is buying the entire company insane?

You've said absolutely nothing constructive or useful, just a bunch of (wrong, imo) opinion.

<comment><USER37> 1) TSLA is spending money it doesn't have to purchase a money losing company that does very little to help spur electric cars. Even if they did, the purchase and association with TSLA would have to somehow have a halo effect that doesn't currently exist. This will not happen because there's no way to increase sales of either. They could have just had a licensing deal or something, instead of purchasing the company at a premium.

To purchase a company that is so far away from your core-business model, ie. electric cars, is insane and fiscally irresponsible. Terrible ideas like this are what distract companies and cause them to fail. Look at Time-Warner purchasing AOL. SCTY is a financing play, that just happens to use solar power as its vehicle. It's maniacal rationalization to believe that this actually helps either business or will justify the purchase price.

2) See #1.

3) Anyone who thinks this is a good purchase can't read a financial statement, because otherwise they would see what sort of cash-flow-negative situation both TSLA and SCTY are in. Companies like this do not go and buy money losing companies that also burn cash.

4) See #1.

5) See #1.

6) I disagree with you.

<comment><USER38> I'm pretty sure there is at the very least a tiny bit of synergy between consuming electricity and producing electricity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> SCTY up 23% after hours ([http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCTY](http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCTY)), TSLA _down_ 7%? ([http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TSLA](http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TSLA))

<comment><USER40> The change in stock price doesn't give the complete picture. You want to look at the change in market cap. There is roughly a 10x difference in the change of market cap with SolarCity increasing by roughly $350 million while Tesla decreasing by $3.5 billion. Tesla has actually lost more shareholder value than it would even take to purchase SolarCity. That would seem to indicate Tesla shareholders feel that SolarCity as a company has negative value. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

<comment><USER41> From what I've seen highly volatile stocks (such as TSLA) have a sort of flyweight effect, if they go up the market expect them go up fast so the go a little bit higher than is rational, same way if they go down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> _you would be able to deploy and consume energy in the most efficient and sustainable way possible, lowering your costs and minimizing your dependence on fossil fuels and the grid_

Naive question: Why is minimizing dependency on the grid more sustainable? Doesn't connecting with the grid allow you to distribute excess power more evenly?

<comment><USER43> I read those as separate benefits.

It's more sustainable because of transmission losses, reusing the real-estate of your roof, and I believe doubling as partial shading and insulation.

Minimizing dependence on the grid is a benefit because power outages exist, and sometimes they can really suck.

<comment><USER42> Even if those are separate phrases they still claim it's "the most efficient way possible" to consume energy. But there are energy losses when going through a battery instead of redistributing the energy in realtime -- much greater than transmission losses. So unless I am missing something, that appears to be a false claim.

<comment><USER44> I think you need to factor in the costs incurred by building and maintaining high voltage power transmission lines. These have to be payed for by users of the power grid. If you go off grid, then you not only reduce transmission losses, you also eliminate costs for use of the power distribution infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Seems to me that if Tesla can bundle things from companies/divisions they own it may work out well for them. Driving a Tesla? Bring it home and plug it in to pull power from your PowerWall, which was charged during the day by your SolarCity panels. Charge a little less on the secondary items, but increase your volume by trying to drive sales to Tesla vehicle owners who might otherwise have never considered such a thing.

If they can combine the PowerWall with the vehicle charging station, that just makes it better.

<comment><USER46> I think the major problem is the total lack of synergy between Tesla and SCTY.

Tesla has a sales program which is basically 0 marketing, 0 sales, 100% inbound and SCTY is tele-sales + door to door (which is payroll intensive and harder to manager). Tesla has an operations cycle which is completely centralized except for the car delivery. All of SCTY is contractors installing stuff on customer roofs.

I do not see any operational synergies between the two companies except for the superchargers (and buying SCTY for superchargers feels wrong).

<comment><USER47> What the press release talks about is combined installation of solar panels and Tesla home infrastructure (charging station + Powerwall). I think that speaks to the sales perspective too - it could be very easy to upsell the (incoming) Tesla customer to a Tesla + SolarCity installation, for a lower CAC than the usual SolarCity sale.

<comment><USER46> I get that, but do they really need to buy solarcity to do that partnership? Why would SCTY not just become a sales channel for TSLA?

<comment><USER43> Optics for consumers, it feels more scummy to have one company advertise another than a company advertise itself. At least to me.

It also makes the accounting simpler and liability, this way no one is going to sue Tesla for giving too good a deal to Solar City, or the reverse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Trying to work something out here, need input, as I've never had this happen before:

I advised a friend to buy Tesla and SolarCity stock some time ago, and they did so. The SolarCity stock was much higher at the time than it is now, perhaps $60-70.

I see that the offer from Tesla involves "0.122x to 0.131x" exchange for Tesla stock. So what does this mean for people whose positions in SolarCity were currently down? They have to hope the Tesla stock eventually goes up enough to recover the loss they suffered on SolarCity?

<comment><USER29> Yes, and up significantly. This is valuing the SCTY shares at $26.50 to $28.50. Your friend would need to wait for TSLA shares to more than double (which would be a higher market cap than Ford, GM, Honda or Nissan).

<comment><USER48> Personally I anticipate that won't be a long wait for the patient investor.

<comment><USER17> Hm I'm not so sure. Ford sells about 5 vehicles per minute around the clock worldwide, they're just a _bit_ ahead of Tesla.

<comment><USER49> Total market for vehicles (Ford) compared to total market for energy storage & vehicles (Tesla).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Given that both companies have insane cash burn and negative cash flows. This would make me very worried if I'm an investor. Not that I wasn't worried before. There's a reason short interest in both companies is fairly high. Their financials are pretty bad.

</comment><comment><USER50> How is conflict of interest generally handled in this sort of situation?

Given that Elon Musk is personally major investor in SolarCity and Tesla is a publicly traded company with obligations to its shareholders, would Elon be removed or limited in his ability to control negotiations with SolarCity? Even though it seems like an acquisition of SolarCity would fit within Tesla's overarching strategy, price negotiation could probably be affected by Elon's interests within SolarCity.

<comment><USER25> No, not necessarily (re Elon being limited or removed). In fact, that's very unlikely.

For example, Berkshire Hathaway has occasionally run into conflicts of interest over its long history. They've usually handled them by being as transparent and open about the details as possible. In one famous acquisition, they intentionally over-paid for the company they were buying that they already held a large stake in. They told the SEC during a questioning about it, that they over-paid by a bit because they wanted their new shareholders to be happy, long-term partners. The SEC regulators apparently struggled to understand the premise, per Buffett's biography.

I would suggest in Elon's case, that his best bet is to be extremely open about all details of the acquisition, including how the price was arrived at. Tesla should pay a bit more than what would otherwise be normal. The more transparent the better. There's nothing to inherently restricts Elon's role here, regulation wise, but he does need to be a bit careful so as to avoid setting up an easy lawsuit.

<comment><USER51> There are a lot of other comments here about margin calls and short sellers, but ignoring all of that, if Tesla had some financial interest in SolarCity, and Elon wanted to buy SolarCity, it may be a conflict of interest if Elon Musk personally attempted to acquire SolarCity instead.

During the most recent Berkshire shareholders meeting Warren mentioned that he tries to never personally buy anything that Berkshire owns or would have interest in owning (and he does personally own financial assets outside of Berkshire.) It is a pretty clear gulf for him and fairly easy since Berkshire operates as a holding company.

The whole view of conflicts of interest can not be fully be evaluated without untangling the exact details and facts of both Elon's ownership interests and Tesla's.

I own a tiny amount of both companies but I don't know enough concrete details about SolarCity. Conceivably if Tesla is moving heavily in to the battery/energy storage business SolarCity could have assets that are much more valuable to that business. I don't know if there is valuable IP, or maybe even the current SolarCity customer base is worth a lot as battery pack customers. Presumably a Tesla battery pack/powerpack doesn't make a lot of sense if the customer doesn't have solar power? If there is an overlap between customers and SolarCity is in bad financial shape, then the acquisition could make sense.

There is a lot of guessing here, and its probably something that may be really obvious either way only years from now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> In combination with the battery business this just makes sense. It is perfectly vertically integrated.

<comment><USER29> How does it make sense? SolarCity is losing an extraordinary amount of money and is heading toward a bankruptcy. Tesla does not have the free cash flow to stop the bleeding.

Elon is a very large (~20%) SolarCity shareholder and this is pretty much a bailout for him.

<comment><USER48> Elon will end up with about one Tesla share for every ten SolarCity shares he previously owned. How does this in any way bail him out or save him? Save him from what, exactly?

Now Tesla is "burdened down" by SolarCity, if you prefer to think of it that way. If anything it's liable to hurt Tesla's stock while SolarCity gets its feet under it. As Tesla's stock drags down, Elon will lose more money than the 20% of $2.1 billion that his SCTY stake was worth today. That's a $420 million stake, and Tesla just dropped $3.2 billion in market cap when this news came up.

I'm totally guessing, but it seems to me this move protects SolarCity from the danger it was in. If SolarCity can make it a bit longer, a couple more years, which they will with no trouble (they were not on the verge of bankruptcy whatsoever), soon Tesla will have all the revenue they need to help SCTY grow. And that's Elon's gamble, as has it all been.

<comment><USER53>
      How does this in any way bail him out or save him?
      Save him from what, exactly?

Alternatively, he'd lose up to $478 million (MV of his % of CSO).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is it legal to use one of your companies to bail out the other? What about obligations to shareholders?

<comment><USER55> > In addition, as a result of their overlapping directorships, Elon Musk and > Antonio Gracias have recused themselves from voting on this proposal at the > Tesla board meeting at which it was approved, and will recuse themselves > from voting on this proposal at the SolarCity board as well. Source: > [https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/tesla-makes-offer-to- > acquir...](https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/tesla-makes-offer-to-acquire- > solarcity)

They're not voting in the board meetings, so can only recommend it to the board and then not vote.

<comment><USER56> They won't be abstaining from the shareholder vote, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Isn't it unusual to make an offer as an "open letter" like this? I thought these discussions generally happen behind tightly closed doors.

<comment><USER58> It the letter it noted that the reason for the public disclosure was due to Elon's significant stake of ownership in SolarCity and SEC disclosure obligations.

<comment><USER57> Ah, there it is. I had read the blog post but skipped the letter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Tesla, Solarcity and SpaceX are eventually going to merge together to create an hyper advanced ecosystem of extremely fast travel, within and outside the confines of Earth. Hyperloop is going to complement this ecosystem quite well.

Basically, Elon Musk is walking into the history books and folklore and we are the ones to witness his humble beginnings.

His efforts/ventures, if successful even marginally, will play a large part in the next technological jump that Humans are going to take as civilization, the previous one being the Western Industrial revolution of the 19th century.

<comment><USER60> Ha ha ha ... he he ...

I remember when I was 21 in the Valley ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> With 98.1 million shares outstanding and an offer price of $26.5 - $28.5 per share. This puts the potential cost of acquisition between $2.6 billion and $2.8 billion.

<comment><USER48> Yes, I too am extremely curious how this factors into Tesla's expenditures plan....where do they find the money for these things?? He must have been planning this for some time.

<comment><USER62> It's an all-equity deal from the letter

<comment><USER48> Oh...of course. This makes a lot of sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The key here is they feel that Tesla customers will be interested in solar, and that Solarcity customers are interested in Tesla. Offering new products to the same customers works great - the core of every business is acquiring customers, and selling more (and related) products to the same customers conserves that core effort.

The disaster is when a company takes on a new product for /new customers/. That is when a company's efforts are diluted.

</comment><comment><USER64> Now SpaceX only needs to start producing electric rockets, then they can all be unified.

<comment><USER65> Elon Musk has publicly mentioned electric aircraft actually: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_electric_jet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_electric_jet)

That wiki doesn't mention it but I remember from an interview something about being able to fly higher and therefore faster because you don't need to worry about a combustion engine and necessary oxygen levels (could be way off though).

<comment><USER66> Lack of oxygen to burn fuel for the engines isn't the only thing that keeps civilian aircraft generally below 50,000 feet. There's a few other things.

For subsonic aircraft, the higher they go, the smaller the "coffin corner" gets. As air gets thinner, the speed of the aircraft where it will stall goes up (in terms of True Airspeed. In terms of Indicated Airspeed it basically stays the same which is why coffin corner is a thing). At the same time, the speed of the air moving around the wings gets faster and faster. This is because the aircraft has to move faster and faster through the air to move the same amount of molecules of air over the wings to create enough lift to hold the aircraft up. At a certain point, the stall speed of the aircraft equals the speed at which air moves over the wings at supersonic speeds. The aircraft stalls while simultaneously overspeeding. Bad things ensue. It is possible to design around this (see U-2), but for civilian aircraft, there's little benefit compared to flying at more typical flight altitudes.

The other issue is in regards to the length of time the pilots will stay conscious in the even of cabin depressurization. For aircraft that fly at high altitudes, the autopilot will have an emergency descent mode in the event that cabin altitude rises above a certain point. This is less of an issue than the first one, though.

In the end, this means that for an electric aircraft to fly higher and faster, it would end up needing to fly at supersonic speeds, and thus deal with the increased energy requirements of that, as well as the regulatory hurdles.

This doesn't mean we won't eventually see electric airliners, but they probably won't have a much different flight profile than today's aircraft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> For anyone who doesn't know Musk is also the Chairman of Solar City.

</comment><comment><USER68> It's not "market penetration" anymore, now we have "customer penetration"?! The Tesla Team must have a truly disruptive view on the world.

</comment><comment><USER25> Tesla will be picking up an additional $2.6 billion in long-term debt, and only $413 million in cash, if the deal completes. They'll also pick up the interest tab at about $120+ million per year in fresh red ink.

It'll bring Tesla's total long-term debt up to $5 billion or so, and push their net tangible assets negative. They'll likely get some debt downgrades out of this.

</comment><comment><USER69> this is the future of energy! end to end energy production, storage as well as one of the greatest energy users all under one roof. combined in a useful package, this could change the energy market dramatically.

if tesla now produces a range of trucks and thereby also enters the transportation sector, they're completing the full circle.

<comment><USER70> Does Tesla have mining operations? Does SolarCity make its own panels?

<comment><USER71> I believe it was going to start manufacturing its own panels (IRIC in NY State)

<comment><USER72> SolarCity was making their own "gigafactory" in Buffalo, NY last I heard - [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600770/10-breakthrough- te...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600770/10-breakthrough- technologies-2016-solarcitys-gigafactory/)

<comment><USER70> That article says that New York state is paying for _and_ building the factory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Conflict of interest? Elon Musk is on the board of SolarCity and his cousins started the company

</comment><comment><USER74> This is fortuitous timing for me. Interestingly (to me), I had a stop loss set to sell all my TSLA at 220.50 today if the stock started to drop again. It did today, so my order was executed. Suddenly this happens.

</comment><comment><USER75> Well, it does fit with their mission statement "Tesla's mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy."

</comment><comment><USER76> Related party transactions smell bad

</comment><comment><USER77> What is this guy doing? I think he is trying to transfer money from one account to another?!

</comment><comment><USER78> This may be >>very good<< for SolarCity and >>just good<< for Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER79> Is it common to make the offer letter public before the deal is made?

<comment><USER80> It's required because Elon Musk is already a significant stockholder in SolarCity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Looking forward to the day when SpaceX finds a way to launch satellites with massive batteries that harvest solar energy from orbit and transports them to and from Earth (to feed Tesla's recharge network).

</comment><comment><USER82> I think this is a great move for Elon to devote more time for SpaceX. His cousins will eventually be running the combined Tesla/SolarCity company.

<comment><USER83> Almost, but not quite. JB Straubel will be the next Tesla CEO. This will happen after the Model 3 launch and after Tesla sells off its car manufacturing to focus on battery/energy/infrastructure.

<comment><USER84> Do you have a source for selling off the car manufacturing part of Tesla?

Its worth noting that JB Straubel is just as passionate about electric vehicles as Elon is. JB actually worked on electric aircraft at his previous company, Volacom.

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

<comment><USER83> No source. Armchair prediction. Not to be taken too seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> didn't his brother start SolarCity or something like that ?

<comment><USER86> Two cousins of his founded it based on a concept by Musk, who I believe helped them start it up and serves as Chairman still.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> > _Your argument is shallow, specious, and ignorant._

Please (re)-read what the HN guidelines have to say about not calling names in arguments ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). We ask people to edit this kind of thing out of their comments here. That will not only make your comments more polite, but more substantive too.

<comment><USER48> Edited. I agree. Sometimes hard to avoid the temptation.

<comment><USER87> Appreciated! We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11949814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11949814) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why did you post the same comment in two places?

<comment><USER87> That was bad but forgivable. We've killed the other comment and marked it as a dupe.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11949754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11949754) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> I can't help but wonder if this went down:

 _Elon Musk: I want to buy Solar City. Can I get a family discount?_

 _Lyndon Rive: Everyone gets a family discount._

\-- Sometime later --

 _Lyndon Rive: Hey Elon, can I get a family discount on a Model X?_

 _Elon Musk: ..._

<comment><USER12> Or the other way around :)

(in that case he'll regret not giving a steep discount on that Model X)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A bad name isn't why SolarCity is an awful business.

<comment><USER89> Just wondering, why is it bad? Does their leasing model screw the homeowner?

<comment><USER49> It doesn't "screw" the homeowner per se, but its not as financially beneficial to them as them financing the system themselves (which, admittedly, can be difficult for a lot of homeowners). If Solar City can still be profitable financing installs instead of doing PPAs, and sales can be turned around using the Tesla model, its a win.

I'm pretty sure the big win is giving Solar City access to Tesla's financing facilities.

<comment><USER90> > but its not as financially beneficial to them as them financing the system > themselves

You could say that for pretty much every service you buy. Yet people keep spending money for things they could do (cheaper) themselves!

<comment><USER49> No no, I don't mean them installing their own systems vs Solar City doing it.

If you have a PPA, the installer reaps all of the financial benefits. If you finance the system, you get all of the financial benefits. Its the difference between leasing a car versus financing it and then driving it until the wheels fall off (keep in mind, panels have a 25 year warranty but will still produce above 80% capacity for decades after that).

<comment><USER90> Again, you could make the same argument for all consumer finance services. Car leasing (as you mentioned), mortgage, student debt...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> The divided tenor in this thread makes me wonder how many people don't realize just how fast tech is accelerating.

<comment><USER92> Can you elaborate? I'm not sure how failing to realize that tech is accelerating relates to the content of this thread.

<comment><USER93> Solar keeps getting cheaper. People are wagging their fingers about bad financials, when SolarCity is still building a huge state-of-the-art factory.

When investing in something like this, it doesn't really make sense to look at what they're doing now, but where they're going to be in the near future.

<comment><USER94> What they are doing now is directly connected to the future. Question is, is the current state of affairs sustainable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> SolarCity moves 100% of their product through churn-and-burn tele-sales.

Elon may have a rude awakening transitioning from"pull" marketing to "push" marketing.

You can't do a 1hr webcast and get 400k solar "pre-pays."

<comment><USER96> What do you mean by churn-and-burn in the context of rooftop solar? Most people have only one roof, so a solar installation is a one-time purchase. What would low churn look like?

<comment><USER95> If boiler room selling is not hardcore enough for you, looks like SolarCity will let you go full "Glengarry Glen Ross" with an in-person "sit" at the customer's house for the real hard sell...

>You will be responsible for identifying potential customers, answering their questions regarding our service and driving to customer consultations and signing them up for our service in their homes.

>TOP PERFORMERS ONLY!

>Unlimited Earning Potential

>2 years prior experience in a quota-driven sales position highly preferred

>This position requires proactively approaching customers throughout the store by engaging the customers in one-on-one discussions and _regularly moving with them as they shop_

[http://www.indeed.com/cmp/SolarCity/jobs/Sales- Representativ...](http://www.indeed.com/cmp/SolarCity/jobs/Sales- Representative-Work-1a5945a7b6ff9b19)

<comment><USER97> WoW. Exactly like a job I almost took but luckily bailed out of as a teenager... still causes shudders, thinking about being on either side of that relationship :-O

<comment><USER74> This is hilarious. In my first year of college I almost took a job at a car dealership. I did the group interview and "sold" them a stapler. They were very impressed and offered me a job. One of them told me it wasn't compatible with college given the time commitment and that I should quit college and take that job, pointing to his "success" of owning five cars.

I went to college instead.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why we procrastinate and how to stop - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/01/12/why.we.procrastinate.and.how.stop

<comment><USER2> I've responded to similar articles on HN with this, and I will do so again here. The way to stop procrastinating, of course, is to read a long article about how not to procrastinate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this effectively the same as

        http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431033

Perhaps this site could do with a flag to cross-reference semi-automatically. This is the second time today I've done this ...

<comment><USER4> Checking, yes, the same text. But as a reader, I didn't see the other one and i did see this one (maybe because it had more upvotes), so, for me, it was a good thing that this one was here. There's an element of competition for most eye-catching headline that I don't think can be administrated away.

BTW: if you state the link directly (not indented), it is automatically linkerized like so: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431033>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am so going to read this later.

<comment><USER6> The sooner you read it, the sooner you can move on to that next bookmark.</comment></comment>


Building a NAS - <AUTHOR> http://jro.io/nas/ <comment><USER2> Wow, I actually just got done building a home NAS for myself. As far as storage controllers, I managed to find myself a working SAS 9201-16i for $50 on eBay (16 port SAS card, only supports IT/HBA mode). Also got some cheap used 10 GbE cards off eBay as well for the link between my workstation and the NAS. Got a 4 port card for the NAS to turn it into a cheapo 10 GbE switch (OCe14104-U-TE with four SFP+ fiber optic transceivers for $190 USD).

I actually bumped into rclone and use Amazon Drive for backups myself. I was worried they'd freak out if I stored multiple terabytes of data there, but if you haven't got any emails about nearly 50 TB of data, I guess i shouldn't be so concerned.

A silly toy project i've been working on is to be able to use Amazon Drive as a block device via something like nbd (linux) or geom (freebsd). Would let me use existing drive encryption mechanisms (no personal data scraping for advertising purposes Amazon) and have the ACD storage be a zfs pool in its own right. Basically, a virtual 'SSD' backed by a collection of chunks (1 to 8 MiB, still benchmarking...) and where TRIM deletes remotely stored chunks.

<comment><USER3> Wow 50TB for $60 per month...

Amazon Drive sounds like an insanely great deal for me if it works the way I think it does, but the reason I haven't tried it yet is I honestly don't see them being able to keep storage space unlimited for very long, if it in fact competes in the same real-time sync'd storage space as the likes of Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.

Every such service that I've ever heard of that offered unlimited storage at one point have had to backtrack on their unlimited storage claims after enough users _really_ took them up on their offer. Note I'm talking about services like Bitcasa and OneDrive, that offer real-time sync/access, not backup & archival services like BackBlaze and Crashplan that don't have the same egress bandwidth requirements.

For those who use Amazon Drive and understand it better, does it do real-time sync like Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox? Or is it just another unidirectional backup service?

<comment><USER4> If you like Google Drive, their Google Apps plan will give you unlimited storage for a slightly more expensive plan.

One limitation I've met with Amazon Cloud Drive is a 50GB file size limit. Both of these support rclone which is what I use for backups anyways.

<comment><USER5> 50GB size limit kills it for me :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a 36T NAS (26T usable raidz2), built using the Norco 4224 chassis. The backplane / drive trays that it comes with aren't 100% reliable, so I would recommend trying to get a SuperMicro chassis instead. I keep mine in the attic to keep the noise down.

Mine runs fine on an old Q6600 with 4G of RAM. I'm not trying to do anything silly, like enabling dedupe, so it's not a problem. I'm running ZFS on Linux, again, not a problem with that amount of RAM despite ZoL having a less than ideal caching situation in the kernel.

I do my backups with Crashplan. Not only do I back up the NAS with Crashplan, but I back up my various PCs and laptops to my NAS, for faster restores should I need it. Crashplan supports peer backup, which works well.

I tuned my recordsize by copying a representative sample of files to different ZFS filesystems with different settings, and comparing du output. The empirical calculation seemed easier.

I've used my NAS for a various things; video / photo archive, VM backing store (serving up zvols as iSCSI endpoints), working space for a variety of side- projects. More than anything else, it gets rid of the idea that storage space is in any way scarce, and removes the requirement to delete things (very often, anyway; I built up several years worth of motorcycle commute headcam videos at one point). My pool wanders between 40 and 70% utilization.

<comment><USER7> 36T to CrashPlan sits on 36GB of RAM at all times... screw that. rclone never uses more than ~2GB to manage my whole 50TB dataset.

edit: Also, I'm using a SuperMicro chassis, not a Norco. I've got a section where I go into why I went with SuperMicro.

<comment><USER8> Uhm, what exactly is crashplan doing with all that memory?

<comment><USER9> I wonder if it's related to the memory "issue" with their client, where exceeding 1TB/1 million files, a manual edit of the .ini file to bump the JVM memory allocation is necessary. I remember reading somewhere that it has to do with CRC checksum calculation for all the files? I've had to change the setting multiple times (currently at 8GB for ~8TB/1 million files).

[https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Troubleshooting/Adjus...](https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Troubleshooting/Adjusting_CrashPlan_Settings_For_Memory_Usage_With_Large_Backups)

<comment><USER8> Hm, maybe give Borg a shot. For initial backups it's not exactly the fastest thing, though much better after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oddly, I recently went the other direction. In the past I've built some storage servers similar to this, and 6 months ago I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB).

Loving it!

Now, my storage needs are fairly modest in comparison to the author. I'm running with RAID-Z2 and at 44% capacity. I have this unit in my work workstation, at an external office. It is quiet and cool.

I used to have a big house with a room I could put a bunch of computers in. I moved to a smaller house, but more importantly I was just tired of managing a business-class infrastructure at home (VLANs, multiple APs, UPSs, batteries, patch panel, servers, etc).

So I copied a backup of my storage server from an off-site box, to S3 with Glacier, copied the primary to this ZFS array on my workstation, removed junk I was just holding on to, and now my home infrastructure consists of a Cable Modem and Google WiFi mesh. Huge improvement in maintenance!

Here's a blog post I wrote about one of the previous incarnations: [https://www.tummy.com/articles/ultimatestorage2008/](https://www.tummy.com/articles/ultimatestorage2008/)

<comment><USER11> > _I took 6x 2TB laptop drives in a 6 drive "mobile rack" that fits in one > 5.24 bay in my desktop (IcyDock MB996SP-6SB)_

Thanks, I didn't realise these exist.

I've been wanting to create a DIY version of Synology's "slim" model line [1] for a while, but haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf enclosure that would fit my needs. Putting six drives in a 5.25" bay is a fantastic idea.

[1] [https://www.synology.com/en- global/products/DS416slim](https://www.synology.com/en- global/products/DS416slim)

<comment><USER12> I came across this product recently: [https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal- cloud-1](https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1) which is seeking crowd funding at the moment. Personally I think they've made a mistake by going for 2.5" storage first with 3.5" coming later. Anyway, it sounds like it might be of interest to you?

<comment><USER13> I like the design and 2.5" choice. But if it doesn't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong. Something like that running FreeNAS (w/o dedup) would be ideal for me.

<comment><USER11> > _But if it doesn 't support zfs it's no go for me. If you (abstract) are not > concerned with bit rot you doing NAS wrong._

What are your thoughts about Btrfs?

<comment><USER13> I trust zfs more but would use btrfs for personal storage provided backup strategy is solid :) I'd go with raid1/raid10 though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I rebuilt my home NAS a few months ago. Former one was a huge Debian tower box with one system+temp storage disk plus 3 soft RAID1 pairs. It worked well for about 6 years, save for a partial failure due to bad disk connectors (SATA connectors are among the worst junk ever designed by a human). CPU was a low power Celeron more than enough for the task. When building the new one I wanted to reduce to the minimum both power consumption and hardware maintenance hassles so I got on Ebay a used server 2U rack box including a good quality PSU, then a Mini ITX industrial Atom main board with 4 SATA ports. Not being that familiar with BSD and derivatives, initially I wanted to stay with Linux, but this time I didn't want to fiddle with mdadm and other stuff so I gave Openmediavault a try; I probably did something wrong, but the experience was frustrating, from menus taking forever to appear to errors that shouldn't be there in a self contained system, so in the end I turned my attention to NAS4Free and never looked back. The only problem being the much greater RAM requirements of ZFS, which makes the maximum RAM on that board (4GB) barely enough, but in the end it works flawlessly as I keep running services to the minimum (NFS, SMB, Transmission). Total expense was very low as everything was purchased used, save of course the 4x3GB WD RED disks. The system boots off a USB key which is plugged directly on an internal USB port, so there are no dongles attached to the case.

<comment><USER15> For OMV, you did something wrong. I've been using the project since its first public release. Never had any real issues.

<comment><USER14> Yup, I'm completely sure about that as nobody else seemed to have experienced the same problems, but after trying to reflash a couple more times I eventually gave up. That doesn't mean I won't try on a different system in the future though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I originally posted this on reddit, but I'm happy to see it reposted elsewhere. Let me know if anyone has any questions.

<comment><USER16> That's a huge setup :)

One questions I have regarding NAS is backups of the NAS itself.

If I have a very simple NAS with 2 drives in Raid 1 (let's call it Drive A and B), and I want to make a physical backup of my NAS in a different location. How easy is it ? What is the best practice. Ideally you could just have a big rsync method that takes care of it, or rclone as described in the article, but what if you want to do it without any network transfer (because your connection is too slow/ you can't afford it)

Does the following protocol make sense: Removing Drive A , replacing it with an empty drive C. Wait for the NAS to synchronize drive C. Then remove Drive B, replace with drive D, wait for the NAS to synchronize drive D.

Taking Drive A and B to a different location, plug them, and have the backup working out of the box.

Is it that easy? What about more complicated RAID setups?

is there an easy "Prepare Backup -> Please insert First drive for your backup -> First drive filled up -> please insert second drive for your backup -> ... -> Please insert last drive for your backup" and then you take all those newly filled drives and shove them in a different box and they have all the data at the time of the backup, with either the right zfs and raid configuration, or at least a simple data dump in a non-raid configuration.

<comment><USER17> If you're using ZFS, the right thing to do is to attach drives C and D temporarily, create a second zpool on them, them use zfs send/receive to replicate snapshots from the primary drives to the backups. You can then export the zpool and move it to a different location.

Refreshing the backups is either done by putting the backups online at the remote location and syncing the deltas between the last snapshot and the current over the net, or by bringing the drives back to the primary, and sending the deltas.

The sanoid/syncoid toolset will help immensely with handing the necessary zfs snapshot and send/receive commands: [https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid](https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I own HP Microserver Gen8. It allows to use 4 disks, it's a real server (ECC memory, hardware watchdog, KVM over network and much more), it's extremely quiet and it costs $200 with Celeron processor. Also it's quite outdated at this moment and requires using "hardware raid" (implemented in software proprietary driver) for optimal cooling, it's awesome machine and I didn't found anything better yet. I only wish HP would continue this line.

<comment><USER19> Why does it require using hardware raid for optimal cooling? I set up one of these recently using AHCI (disabling the hardware raid controller) with mdadm.

<comment><USER18> When you're using hardware raid, server is able to read HDD temperatures and adjusts fans accordingly. When you're using AHCI, server can't read HDD sensors and turns fans higher. I'm not sure why it's implemented this way, but you can easily check it via iLo web interface. For me it's 20% fan vs 6% fan and I can distinguish it, I can hear 20% fan at silent night, but 6% fan is really silent, so my wife can sleep well.

If you don't have those problems with noise, it doesn't matter (and I would recommend to avoid those "hardware" raids, I have much more trust with widely used open source solutions).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I used to build my own NAS systems; and it's fine if it's a hobby; but it's a lot less trouble and a lot less stressful (when you actually have data to care about) to use something ready made like a QNAP. I switched to a QNAP TS-863U a few months ago, and boy is it great to have a UI that will let you do RAID upgrades/resizing without having to lay awake at night wondering if you chose the right incantation of mdadm out of the 3 or 4 you came up with that could work.

<comment><USER21> Commercial consumer NAS boxes are notoriously bad wrt security though, even firewalled. Apple Airport Extreme is probably the only one with a decent track record (and I say this as someone who doesn't use Apple products).

Eg QNAP requires you to install security patches manually, and as a result had a ShellShock worm exploiting QNAP boxes: [https://threatpost.com/shellshock- worm-exploiting-unpatched-...](https://threatpost.com/shellshock-worm- exploiting-unpatched-qnap-nas-devices/109870/)

<comment><USER20> That report isn't quite accurate; you can install updates automatically on the device I have (I don't know if there was some point in time where that wasn't possible; seems like a basic feature). Some require reboots though, which is why by default updates aren't automatic. Who sets their servers on fully automatic updates (and reboots) anyway? I mean, even forgetting about the reboots - you don't want fileservers to disconnect all clients at any random point in time because it has to install some update to the service software.

<comment><USER21> This kind of NAS should definitely automatically update and reboot rather than become wormable.

A high-availability file server is a different beast from a home NAS.

<comment><USER20> The one I have is not a home nas. It's a rack mount machine with a bunch of 'enterprise' features, and marketed/sold as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> People always make such a big deal out of getting ashift "right". In actual fact, there is NEVER any valid excuse to make ashift any smaller than 12. It should default to 12. It is a scandal that it still defaults to 9. You aren't going to find a single hard drive in the world that you would ever use in ZFS, which does _not_ have 4k sectors, papered over as _fake_ 512 byte sectors in the interface.

<comment><USER23> In FreeBSD, there's a sysctl for setting minimal ashift to 12 and ignoring 9 reported by disk. I always have this one in my /etc/sysctl.conf:

vfs.zfs.min_auto_ashift=12

(This must be done before creating ZFS pool.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I did a smaller, simpler build with 8 x hotswap-bay SATA drives running off two 4-port PCIe SATA controllers. Not counting drives, it came to about $550.

[http://www.mrbill.net/nasbuild/](http://www.mrbill.net/nasbuild/)

I originally started building it around a Dell YK838 SAS 6i PCIe controller card, but got tired of fiddling with using other systems to reflash the firmware and then having to mask off pins on the PCIe connector to get the system to even POST.

I replaced all the "factory" fans, as well as the two on the back of the hotswap drive modules, with Noctua equivalents.

</comment><comment><USER25> Whenever I see one of these periodic postings of people using FreeNAS, and they come up on HN every few months, I'm always looking for the answer to IMO the most obvious, most basic question:

       Why FreeNAS; why not vanilla FreeBSD?

I've _never_ seen a good, detailed answer to this. Mostly the response is along the lines of: "well, of course use FreeNAS, after all you're building a NAS!"

From what I can tell, FreeNAS offers a pretty GUI and some tuning on top of FreeBSD. Anything else?

<comment><USER7> Because I've never done this before and I wanted a more manageable learning curve. I had very little *nix experience and zero bsd or zfs experience before I started this project. My next server will probably be vanilla bsd, but then again it might be freenas because it just makes the whole setup process easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> People are going to hate me for this, as it's not a Linux solution... but after trying various *nix NAS distros and being disappointed, I settled on letting Windows do it for me:

\- Get a generic small tower box with 3-4 year old hardware in it via eBay (or a business IT clearance site)

\- If it's not got Windows on it, find a dirt cheap copy of Windows Server 2008 (again eBay etc).

\- If there's no SATA RAID on the motherboard (unlikely), get a 4 to 8 port PCIe RAID card.

\- Thrown in a bunch of identical disks of your preferred size

\- For Raid 1: In Windows mount them all, and create Mirrored sets in software (via Diskmgmt)

\- For Raid 5: Either do it via the BIOS (if supported) or via Diskmgmt (however RAID 5 in software is quite slow).

\- Create file shares (SMB/CIFS/FTP etc).

\- Job done.

I have this as my main File Server, and unless I'm hammering the box from multiple clients simultaneously I get max Gigabit throughput on all file transfers.

Also, and this is the big bonus for me, Software RAID 1 in Windows doesn't create funny disk volumes, so you can break the mirror and still access all your data from the remaining drive(s) - I've seen horror stories of bespoke partitioning in commercial NASs, and people losing data when the motherboards die - I don't want that ever happening to me.

Finally - Windows Server also supports iSCSI, so you can just keep adding new boxes with disks in, all presented via the same File Server.

<comment><USER27> Out of curiosity, how do windows filesystems for solutions like these compare to ZFS in terms of reliability and features ? ZFS has been my only choice for NAS servers at home primarily due to it's data integrity features.

<comment><USER28> They don't, they are equivalent to ext4 (ie. no error checking, dedupe etc...).

<comment><USER29> Deduplication went into NTFS on Windows Server in 2012.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> System is probably good for 3 or 4 years, right? If your cost of funds is 6%, that works out to: 3 years: $177/month 4 years: $136/month

Add $20/month for electricity: 3 years: $197/month 4 years: $156/month

Could that rent respectable enough device(s) in the cloud?

<comment><USER31> Getting 60TB of usable space in the cloud is pretty expensive. Honestly I have no idea why he needs so much space, but if he does need it all, he probably didn't make out too badly. One of the main benefits of the cloud, though, is that you only pay for what you use, and he has to over-provision from the beginning, so let's consider that.

So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space. If he uses Amazon S3's standard storage, he would be paying about $230/mo. If he uses infrequent storage that is $125/mo. That goes up as his usage goes, so when he's using 30TB that will be $690/mo and $375/mo respectively. He also has the benefit of high speed ethernet with the home NAS, unless he has fiber 1Gig internet, in which case speed is probably a wash. I'm not sure if there are other significantly cheaper cloud storage solutions at that scale.

So I'd say he hasn't done too badly for himself, though he probably could have saved some on the hardware by getting cheaper parts.

<comment><USER32> > So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space.

Other way around; he's using ~50TB of ~60TB with ~10TB free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You didn't say how fast it is?

That many drives, you should be able to saturate a good part of a 10Gb link. The difference for streaming read/write loads (like copying movies..) is night and day vs 1Gbit. That is assuming you've got enough CPU to run ZFS that fast. That is part of the reasons I stick to linux MD/xfs. Every time I try to use ZFS I run out of CPU or RAM. Also, given that I want low idle power means I'm not willing to throw enough hardware at it to make ZFS run well.

<comment><USER7> It'll saturate a 1Gb link, obviously. I've been eyeing 10Gb configurations for a while, that will be my next upgrade. I'd really like to stick with copper so I can wire the whole house for 10Gb and have some super fast X11 nodes, but we'll see.

<comment><USER33> BTW: I'm running 10GbaseT at my house, and every single foot of it is cheap cat5e. Its rock solid (yah I can monitor mangled packets drop rates on my switch). I've had a lot of people talk down copper 10G and tell me things like its not possible to use anything but cat6A or better. Which is a load of BS if your runs are well under the 200M that is possible with cat 6A. I think my switch actually says that that it supports runs of 45M on cat5E, which is probably still 2x the max run in my house.

Frankly, the asus XG-D2008 and a few Chinese x540 boards (~$100 for two ports)with cat5 cost less than some of the fancy home AP's and is well within the prices I paid for my first 1G hardware. Two workstations and a server should be less than $600.

Adding to this this, there is the Ubiquiti US-16-XG which also has a bunch of SFPs for under $600.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wow, this is an amazingly detailed blog post. I only skimmed it, but since I'm in the process of setting up my own NAS I'll definitely have to revisit it and read slowly.

Is anyone here using FreeNAS Corral? I've been toying around with it for a few days, and its been a frustrating experience. My first sign that I should've avoided it was that trying to install 10.0.3 with UEFI just fails. With 9.10 they have a nice docs page with lots of details and info, but with Corral they just threw it all out. The web interface provides no help, and the cli just gives a brief sentence which is usually of little help. I can see the long- term potential in Corral, but right now it feels like a rushed out beta. Should I just install FreeNAS 9.10 instead, or is it worth sticking with Corral? Are there any other OSs that I should try out?

Since we're on the subject of home networks, what are people's thoughts on running FreeIPA and FreeRadius? I'm hoping to use it to setup a home VPN server, as well as provide a means of performing authN/authZ for multiple "personal cloud" applications. My goal is to reduce my reliance on cloud providers, since I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with their practices and the loss of privacy.

<comment><USER35> They have recently updated the download page for FreeNAS Corral to say in large letters "NOT FOR PRODUCTION" and after using it for the last month, I can see why. A good example of some issues, would be found here: [https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/10-0-3-problems...](https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/10-0-3-problems.53205/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The problem with these NAS is noise. I see on the pictures that the NAS is just next to his desk. Even if you get a quiet chassis (rack servers tend to be noisy as hell, but synology chassis are pretty quiet), having 12+ disks running next to you is very noisy too. I am looking forward the time SSD will be cheap enough to be used for mass storage.

<comment><USER7> I have this system sitting next to me in my home office which I share with my wife. Both of us work from home full time and the server is quiet enough that she doesn't complain about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone taken a deep dive look into rclone crypto? I looked around but didn't find anything in a quick search.

Only thing I've seen so far is [https://rclone.org/crypt/](https://rclone.org/crypt/)

<comment><USER38> Not any more than this HN comment [1] and its replies, one of which is mine. It's using golang's own extensions for secretbox [2], a NaCl-secretbox- compatible implementation, and it's adhering to the uniqueness of nonces as far as I can tell [3].

In other words, to my non-crypto-expert eyes, there is no glaring misuse of the "golang.org/x/crypto/nacl/secretbox" API that jumps out at me; I haven't looked at that package to see if it's okay.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12398303#12398727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12398303#12398727) [2] [https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/nacl/secretbox](https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/nacl/secretbox) [3] [https://github.com/ncw/rclone/blob/master/crypt/cipher.go](https://github.com/ncw/rclone/blob/master/crypt/cipher.go)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Eh. Cool. To much work. I just bought a FreeNAS Mini because I am lazy. But this very cool.

<comment><USER40> been thinking of DIYing a freenas mini xl.. can save about $500 by building with the same MB, but don't like the case options.. not sure what case iXSystems uses, or where they get it (probably custom)... but with the same MB and an 8-drive itx case, came out around $900, but concerned about the clock/brick issue with that CPU.

<comment><USER41> The 8-drive version is built around an Ablecom CS-T80 case.

The 4-drive version is a SuperMicro 721TQ-250B system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've had two of those chassis fail over the last couple years... would not recommend.

<comment><USER43> Fail how?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> What's your cpu utilization like? Xeon E5-1630 seems a little overkill

<comment><USER7> Oh, it's totally overkill, but I don't have any regrets. I have a couple VMs that can sit on a lot of CPU time when they're in active use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I like the creative use of what appears to be an Ikea table for a rack.

<comment><USER46> That's actually a fairly common setup, known as a LackRack [0], although this one seems to be a different size/model, but maybe that's my eyes playing tricks on me.

Edit: actually now that I look back at it I'm almost positive this is the deeper lack "coffee table".

[0] [https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack](https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack)

<comment><USER7> Enterprise Edition, baby! It's an official variant.

By the way, if anyone is considering deploying their own LackRack, I would highly recommend reading the installation section in the OP. It's got some quirks that are worth considering before you dive in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Incredibly comprehensive article. Thanks for sharing.

First thing that jumps out at me, though: in the photos at the top, the UPS is on the floor.

Get that UPS off the floor! When your house suffers minor flooding (burst pipe, overflowing toilet, leaky roof, etc), it will be sitting in it. You think it won't happen--but then it does, and if your electronics on the floor don't get damaged, you're lucky.

<comment><USER7> Good call... I'll prop it up on something soon. This is on the second floor of my house, so it's safe from flooding, but I'd hate to have spilled water kill my stuff.

<comment><USER47> > This is on the second floor of my house, so it's safe from flooding

Not if there's a toilet on the second floor. I speak from experience. :( Neighbor's upstairs toilet tank burst while she was at church. Couple hours later, it's raining inside my apartment and her whole place is ruined. I was very lucky that my computers didn't get ruined. 50-cent piece of plastic connecting the tank to the supply line caused thousands of dollars of damage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's stupid overkill but I plan to do this using CEPH. The hard part is finding the right low power high performance server. Suggestions welcome.</comment>


Literate raytracer: a simple implementation of raytracing in Javascript - <AUTHOR> https://tmcw.github.io/literate-raytracer/ <comment><USER3> On the opposite end of the spectrum, there's my very illiterate and very short JS raytracer (959 bytes): [http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/tiny- raytracer.html](http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/tiny-raytracer.html)

To atone for my sins, I also wrote a (free, online) 3D rendering textbook, half of it dedicated to raytracing: [http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/computer- graphics-from-scratc...](http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics- from-scratch)

<comment><USER4> This is really awesome! Thanks for writing and sharing your book for free!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Peter Shirley's _Raytracing in a Weekend_ minibooks are another good introduction that goes beyond rendering spheres, and they are now available for free:

[https://twitter.com/Peter_shirley/status/1029342221139509249](https://twitter.com/Peter_shirley/status/1029342221139509249)

<comment><USER6> Jamis Buck (wrote Mazes for Programmers) also has a pretty good one in progress. It's very TDD driven, which is an interesting approach.

[https://pragprog.com/book/jbtracer/the-ray-tracer- challenge](https://pragprog.com/book/jbtracer/the-ray-tracer-challenge)

<comment><USER7> How much of this has actually been written? Can't seem to find any information on current progress beyond the releases section (which notes 4 additional chapters in the last couple months, but little about existing chapters), and googling doesn't immediately turn up any kind progress-blog. I'm not assuming in-order writing, since I've seen other `beta` e-books not follow it (and it often makes sense not to)

<comment><USER6> So far the pace seems to be about two chapters a month, with the update today bringing the total up to 14. According to the TOC, that only leaves three more to go, plus revision and editing. It is being released in-order - <USER2> the author's twitter and screenshots posted there over the past two years, it looks like the content is complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a bug in the lambert code:

        var lightPoint = scene.lights[0];

this should be

        var lightPoint = scene.lights[i];

</comment><comment><USER9> Great tutorial! I took this work and expanded on it by building a Rust/Wasm version of this Raytracer. I wrote about it here: [http://matt- harrison.com/raytracing-webassembly-vs-javascrip...](http://matt- harrison.com/raytracing-webassembly-vs-javascript/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I love the focus on implementation. That really connects the underlying ideas with working code.

For those interested in a gentle introduction to those underlying ideas, including a refresher on the required math, I taught a class on how to implement a ray tracer. All the materials are available: [https://avik- das.github.io/build-your-own-raytracer/](https://avik-das.github.io/build- your-own-raytracer/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've bodged together a slow python implementation here: [https://gist.github.com/JosephRedfern/ea6a7e8f3f59a28296ac30...](https://gist.github.com/JosephRedfern/ea6a7e8f3f59a28296ac30ea2c813208)

I kept variable names roughly the same in order to make it easy to compare the JS version to the Python version. I also translated vector.js to python (for the same reasons), even though you could probably just use numpy directly.

</comment><comment><USER12> It reminds me a photorealistic JS raytracer (SmallPT port) I made five years ago :) [http://renderer.ivank.net/](http://renderer.ivank.net/) .

Here are output images: [http://renderer.ivank.net/balls.jpg](http://renderer.ivank.net/balls.jpg) [http://renderer.ivank.net/cornell.jpg](http://renderer.ivank.net/cornell.jpg)

I also made a version with triangle models: [http://3dtool.ivank.net/](http://3dtool.ivank.net/) :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Just so people don't get too hung up on speed issues, please realize that the major advantage with raytracing over rasterization is that it's trivially parallelizable. Naive implementations of ray tracing and rasterization run at O(log n) and O(n) respectively, so at some point in the near future ray tracing (or its optimized version ray marching) will likely win out. See the "Calculation effort" graph mid-page:

[https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Ray-Tracing-and- Gam...](https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Ray-Tracing-and-Gaming-One- Year-Later/Ray-tracing-faster-rasterization-Example-1)

And a bit more recent writeup:

[https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/05/27/nvidia- bound.html](https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/05/27/nvidia-bound.html)

Many of the Demoscene demos today use ray marching. Here are some examples of ray marching in WebGL, to show what's possible (and probably inevitable) in the next 5-10 years:

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

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm intrigued by the concept of literate programming and interested in exploring options for a Scala project I'm working on right now. It looks like this one was done using Docco [1]. Docco supports Scala, and it appears to be a pretty lightweight approach, largely using Markdown. I'm curious whether any literate programming veterans have tooling they prefer?

[1] [http://ashkenas.com/docco/](http://ashkenas.com/docco/)

<comment><USER15> It depends on what you are looking for. Docco and friends seem to only be capable of reversing the relationship between comments and code.

However, they don't allow you to structure the program however you might like independently the need order and _nesting_ of code. In a lot of cases you can get around this through appropriate design patterns.

I've recently taken a quite deep dive into possible tools for literate programming. I work with signal processing so code documentation is extremely important but also frustratingly challenging.

There are a lot of "old" tools for literate programming (noweb, FunnelWeb), and they all lack in platform support, but are exceptionally stable and quite pleasant to work with. The more modern "true" literate programming tools are typically using a form of markdown (no links since my notes are not at hand). The last group are the "coffee script style" tools and they seem to be quite popular and active.

It seems to be a case of natural selection for tooling: true literate programming is serverely disadvantaged in terms of IDE/editor support and the programming philosophy is, unfortunate, too different from the norm. Docco styles seems highly pragmatic in contrast.

One option I haven't tried yet is Emacs' org-mode which includes true literate programming support. I haven't found much with regards to real-world usage.

<comment><USER14> I think I gonna try [https://github.com/driusan/lmt](https://github.com/driusan/lmt)

I like that it is markdown and that it has a many-to-many mapping of input to output files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I appreciate the concept of literate programming, however I think this example would be better presented in a 2-column format: All chunks of the program presented in 1 column with accompanying explanations in a second, parallel column. There would be breaks in either column to allow for either the chunk of code or prose to have different lengths.

Then, if desired, one could read the code and/or narrative straight through.

</comment><comment><USER17> When I was young, graphics programming is what got me to try coding in the first place. At the time, all books I picked up for intros to graphics programming were more about teaching DirectX, and DirectX in the late 90s before IntelliSense was no fun. I found it horribly arcane and ended up a backend/web engineer.

I think if I had better examples like this to follow I would've gotten a lot farther.

<comment><USER18> Visual Studio has IntelliSense since 1996, were you using DirectX 1.0?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Inigo Quilez (one of the Shadertoy creators) has a good list of ray-primitive intersections with GLSL source. [http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/intersectors/intersec...](http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/intersectors/intersectors.htm)

</comment><comment><USER20> I did similar a few years ago, but then after seeing how bad the performance was, I took the exact algorithm and redid it in Java (just for comparison) and the difference in performance astounded me.</comment>


Daylight saving impacts the timing of heart attacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-03/acoc-dsi032714.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Data from the largest study of its kind in the U.S. reveal a 25 percent jump in the number of heart attacks occurring the Monday after we "spring forward" compared to other Mondays during the year – a trend that remained even after accounting for seasonal variations in these events. But the study showed the opposite effect is also true. Researchers found a 21 percent drop in the number of heart attacks on the Tuesday after returning to standard time in the fall when we gain an hour back.

</comment><comment><USER2> I still have no idea why we even go through with daylight saving anymore. It's been exactly 100 years since WWI.</comment>


Iceland, a land of Vikings, braces for a Pirate Party takeover - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-a-land-of-vikings-braces-for-a-pirate-party-takeover/2016/10/23/f1bfe992-9540-11e6-9cae-2a3574e296a6_story.html <comment><USER2> Iceland gets way too much press in the western hemisphere than it deserves, it has what, 300K population in the middle of nowhere with no particularly interesting acheivements?

Pirate party, ok, cool. Let me know when it's the U.K or U.S or even say Spain or something. Hell, would be better even if it's a province/city in China.

<comment><USER3> Cities and provinces in larger countries do not have nearly the same level of governing autonomy, nor do they have the same privileges according to international law.

Perhaps places like Singapore deserve to be talked about more than they are for the same reason, but Iceland is interesting because it seems to be exploring new ideas in governance in a serious manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dupe ...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775974](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775974)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you discuss in your one on ones? - <AUTHOR> I've been wondering what's the best use you can make of your one on ones (for someone who recently started working). What do you discuss when you have regular one on ones with your leads and irregular ones with org leads etc? <comment><USER2> I actively try to avoid discussing status. The 1:1 is primarily a meeting for them, whether or not they realize it. The goal in a 1:1 is primarily to get them talking about whatever it is that they want to talk about. Sometimes this just turns into chatting about non-work stuff. Sometimes we'll discuss problems they're having on the team. Sometimes they'll talk about work they want to do but haven't been given. Sometimes they'll have questions about "how the system works" (these are usually pretty interesting conversations). I try to tell stories from my own work history (frequently embarrassing ones) both because they're funny, and because it makes it easier for them to talk about their own potentially embarrassing problems. Sometimes I try to lead the conversation toward something that I want to talk about - like if I need to give them some feedback, or if I want to discuss their career development, or a new opportunity. Sometimes you can tell that they're circling around something they don't know how to bring up, and you can gently nudge them in the right direction.

Sometimes it's useful, and sometimes it isn't. Ultimately, if it helps to deepen trust and understanding, then that's a good result.

<comment><USER3> It's funny because when I read the sentence "the 1:1 is primarily for them" i didn't realize you were a manager. To the me the 1:1 is primarily for the manager. I need my manager to talk about their perception of how the work, more specifically my work, is going.

<comment><USER4> I'm an engineer, and my 1x1 meetings all feel useless to me. It is 100% a meeting for managers and I'd skip every single one if I could.

I would vastly prefer an ad hoc meeting when I actually have something to talk about instead of 30 minutes every week where I'm constantly struggling to find material for this useless meeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From experience, majority of 1:1's turn into detailed status updates rather than goals and career growth. When you think about it, your goals don't change every weeks. Which is why a weekly status update on your project will always be the main topic of conversation because it changes constantly. "Are you blocked?", "what's your ETA for XYZ", "did you talk to bob about ABC?". etc...

Your goals and career growth are discussed prior to your annual review. It's sounds bad but that's reality.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been on both ends of 1:1s. For a manager, they seem great - a regular meeting, a chance for staff to talk about things. But they're not. They're window dressing. If you need the 1:1 to see what mood your staff are in, you're not paying attention. If you need the meeting for your staff to be able to tell you what they could do with to make their work easier, you're not approachable.

From the perspective of a developer, they are an unwanted interruption, and a great example of the kind of make-work that gets in the way of productivity. You'll waste an hour in a 1:1, plus whatever time it takes to get back to what you were working on, and that is time that you usually can't spare.

<comment><USER7> I wish the managers earlier in my career had given me 1-1s. Done right, they can really accelerate your career development and help you get more out of your job, as well as be a better employee.

1-1s and being available/approachable are not mutually exclusive. Not every employee is comfortable bringing up nagging frustrations without a formal venue for them. Especially those earlier in their careers.

And in terms of interruptions, some of us would rather have an hour scheduled on the calendar that we can work around than random drive-by interruptions from a manager who wants to "stay in touch". A 1-1 is for those conversations that the employee might not otherwise initiate, and it's for exploratory chats that eventually make it to territory you might not have covered if you were only discussing what's front of mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's different for each of my reports, and it's different when I have my 1:1 with my manager as well.

My manager and I usually talk about high level strategy - he does more talking, letting me know about direction decisions that have been made or things I have to plan for.

One of my reports likes to go into a technical deep dive and get advice on whatever he happens to be working on. These usually run a bit long (a couple hours) so I have them scheduled such that it isn't a problem.

Another coworker just gives status updates, lets me know general status, points out any new issues or changes in existing challenges that I may not be aware of. I keep on top of what's going on so they're pretty short.

Another report likes to chat about the industry, what's going on, random stuff from within the company. This 1:1 is more like a little break for both of us. Sometimes we just skip if either of us is busy or there's nothing to talk about.

No two are the same, but I always try to cover two minimum things: 1) Pass down any new information that is relevant to what they're doing, and 2) Ask if there's anything they're blocked on that I can help with.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not trying to hijack this conversation, but how do you convince a company that regular 1:1 meetings are worth it?

</comment><comment><USER10> As a lead developer/eng manager, I tend to discuss in my 1-1s with my team things that are of concern to people, changes people liked, changes people didn't like, and why to everything. I will ask for feedback on how can I better help them. As a company, we also ask each person what is one thing the person can do to improve. I will also ask what ideas people have to improve the team, or observations they had that are of concern - sometimes people don't feel as comfortable sharing their thoughts in a group setting, especially if someone is overbearing. It also is an opportunity for the team members to step away from product development craziness and reflect.

I also give the monthly performance review then too, but I try to de-emphasize that because the numbers aren't too important except as a rough bar of the feedback being given upstream to higher management.

The one on ones that I have with my director of engineering and VP are geared towards a variety of topics, such as feedback they have heard about me from other co-workers, things of concern that I have done, things I can improve upon, things I am doing well, and suggestions for things I can try to apply to improve team performance. My director of engineering is also interested in the performance of each person, the contours of their situation, and what I am doing to try to improve their output, while the VP is a little more interested in the higher level aspects of overall team performance and management.

1-1s are as useful as the people involved make them. A good manager is important because if the person isn't trying to make use of the meeting to draw out more information on how to improve the team dynamic & help the person get better, then it is a waste, but on the flip side, the person must be cognizant to a degree, and be willing to make the effort to improve.

</comment><comment><USER11> My manager of the last couple of years asks the same handful of questions every single time, a structure that I felt a little skepticism toward when he was detailing it in our first such meeting. But they work really well as prompts to get me talking and I feel consistently "heard" when leaving our one on ones.

<comment><USER7> What are those questions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> At my workplace we are given a template, which is primarily status reports. Since it is supposed to be my meeting I proposed allowing me to use my own discussion items. This was agreed to. We have meetings once a month. I jot down thoughts when they occur during the month and then discuss them in the meeting. Discussion items include:

\- What am I excited about

\- Where do I want to go/grow in my position/career

\- Any clarifications need to be made

\- Any problems or frustrations

I rarely look forward to these meetings, but I usually find them helpful. A lot of items get discussed which never would have been, which is of great benefit to me, the department and management.

</comment><comment><USER13> I work on a team of three so I get to talk to my manager (who's technical, BTW) several times a day for immediate work-related stuff. We then have monthly one-on-ones for higher level discussion, with no need to talk about low level day-to-day stuff. We usually go through the formalities first -- upcoming leave, progress on development plan, etc., expanding on these as appropriate. We then usually have time to talk about other things like any interesting techniques/technologies we've discovered that might be useful, good books/videos/talks we've read, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Whatever the dev wants to talk about, it's their meeting. Hopefully nothing project/team related. We have team meetings were we can talk about team stuff, we have daily stand up and possible meetings for project related stuff. They only time I want them to talk about project related activity or team related activity is if they feel they can't talk about with other developers.

But mostly, It's about them, how they are doing, where they are doing well, how they can improve, where they are going with their career. Hopefully feedback to me about me too.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how common these one-on-one are? Apart from bi-yearly reviews, I've never heard of something like this, although the environment I currently work in is particularly toxic in this respect.

</comment><comment><USER16> I follow the format from Manager Tools. That's where I learned about one-on- ones.

[https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/trinity-one- ones](https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/trinity-one-ones)

Essentially, 10 minutes for them, 10 minutes for me, 10 minutes on the work front. It varies by person and phase of the moon. Personal stuff is important to discuss, I think.

I'm still learning how to do this after six months. We _rarely_ fail to have one-on-ones.

</comment><comment><USER17> It depends on who I am having my one-on-one with. If it is my day-to-day manager we discuss tasks for the sprint and beat, scheduling, task priority, some overall project status topics, etc. If I'm having a one-on-one with my line manager we discuss how I'm feeling overall, big picture in terms of the project or studio, what my goals are, what it looks like I'll be doing (or what I want to do) after the current project, performance feedback, etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> Focus on making forward progress. Report on what is blocking you from doing your job, and propose alternatives rather than just state that you are stuck.

</comment><comment><USER19> They're generally a waste of time. Fortunately I don't have them at my current job.</comment>