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Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

explorer.oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#211

Post by yencabulator »

numpad0 wrote: post #129
andrewl-hn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could edit my post. Somehow everyone wrote to me about baldes. These are not the same, though. Blade servers were mounded into units of 4u, 8u, etc, they occupied a portion of the overall cabinet and still had to do "plumbing" for power and networking behind the chassis to the rest of the cabinet or to the rest of the datacenter. A full-cabinet blade rig would have multiple 8u blade units and some off the sh…

Forgot how I learned this but IIUC, blades failed because they expended per-rack weight and power budgets for datacenters with single enclosures. It turned out that you could compress 48U worth of computers into 8U or so, as long as you do not fill back the empty space with anything, because the cooling/cabling crawlspace collapses and circuit breakers will go off if you had done so. It wasn't because they still need…

> but blades did fell out of fashion,

I prefer to think of that was "datacenter weren't ready for denser workloads"; blades were ahead of their time, and their adoption wasn't great because of that. Since then, new datacenters have been built with more ambitious power/cooling/weight budgets.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#212

Post by dzonga »

jjice wrote: post #6

I want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware. Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show. I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over th…

I want oxide to win as well.

it's bring a new mentality of owning instead of renting.

however - I feel like the industry is what's letting them down.

had posted this earlier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687341 - on whether Multi-core is dead.

because these racks - it means - you've to embrace putting the hardware to work. which I don't think the industry is willing to do or able to.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#213

Post by tptacek »

steveklabnik wrote: post #198
tptacek wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some qualms with Oxide's hiring philosophy (I will have opinions on anything I allow myself to have opinions on, and "opinions on hiring processes" are part of my personal identity) but I want to call this complaint out. You can see from this thread that Oxide is a company with an online fan base. If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role…

> If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is not just that: it's an avalanche of very high quality applicants. If it were a lot of poor ones, that would be easier! I'm sure yinz get lots of great ones too, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between "thousands of resume spam people you'd never hire" and "hun…

No, yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about too.

I don't expect anybody to have any sympathy for the plight of nerd-popular and well-capitalized tech companies. I'm only saying that understanding all the accurate descriptive claims about these processes will help you make better predictions about the world. "I got ghosted by Oxide" is in fact not a very useful input to the question of how they treat their team.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#214

Post by steveklabnik »

tptacek wrote: post #213
steveklabnik wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is not just that: it's an avalanche of very high quality applicants. If it were a lot of poor ones, that would be easier! I'm sure yinz get lots of great ones too, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between "thousands of resume spam people you'd never hire" and "hun…

No, yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about too. I don't expect anybody to have any sympathy for the plight of nerd-popular and well-capitalized tech companies. I'm only saying that understanding all the accurate descriptive claims about these processes will help you make better predictions about the world. "I got ghosted by Oxide" is in fact not a very useful input to the question of how they treat their team.

For sure.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#215

Post by 0xCAP »

crabmusket wrote: post #132
jjice wrote: post #6

I want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware. Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show. I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over th…

I'm pretty sure I'm not talented enough for Oxide, but just asking myself the application questions has been a fun exercise. I'm not in love with their problem space, but I am really into the way they work and do business. Greatest hope: their approach catches on outside just Oxide, and I get to work somewhere with a similar ethos and practises one day. Greatest fear: the way they work only makes sense for the most e…

The only way to build a non toxic company is to have a good culture of cherry picking non toxic individuals all the way from the board of investors.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#216

Post by adastra22 »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #168
adastra22 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None, they won’t. But it would out Oxide into the strong negotiating position, and not at the mercy of NVIDIA. NVIDIA has one primary weakness here: GPUs are NOT optimal hardware for training or inference. No competitor has the market reach to challenge them though. An open standard supported by high growth, breakout startup would change that though.

[flagged]

I'm sure the folks at SGI had the same opinion of NVIDIA back in the day.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#217

Post by bflesch »

xoa wrote: post #171
bflesch wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your product and company look really cool, I hope you succeed. In the youtube video you've shared there's an interesting section about your values and how trust is needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY&t=4899 I wonder how Oxide plans to gain trust with European customers who are forced to witness toxic behavior by US elites on a regular basis? In the past, the DELL/CISCO hardware and their backdoors wer…

At the time I write this parent comment is grey and I don't think it deserves to be. Some people may be down voting around the blanket statement about "US elites" despite a lot of elites clearly not being ok with the horrendous actions taken this last year, but regardless of that the concerns around dependencies and abuse of power right now are very real and quite justified particularly internationally. There are har…

Hey, just wanted to note that I appreciate your thoughtful answer and didn't downvote it.

Oxide sounds really good on paper but for the export version there will most likely be some foot angles, and I can't see many EU companies taking this leap of faith.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#218

Post by bflesch »

steveklabnik wrote: post #193
bflesch wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your product and company look really cool, I hope you succeed. In the youtube video you've shared there's an interesting section about your values and how trust is needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY&t=4899 I wonder how Oxide plans to gain trust with European customers who are forced to witness toxic behavior by US elites on a regular basis? In the past, the DELL/CISCO hardware and their backdoors wer…

Not at Oxide anymore, but > and their backdoors One thing about Oxide's product is that it significantly eliminates a lot of these sorts of vectors. Pretty much every part of the rack that can be is open source, for example. That BMC from other vendors that have a full OS running inside, where you have no clue what it's doing? You can go look at what does that job over here: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris Th…

Thanks for the insight, it sounds really good and I hope they can deliver it as promised.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#219

Post by dijit »

esseph wrote: post #176
kaashif wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you. If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal? You'll get fewer bad employees, but you also discard many capable people who haven't had the opportunity to even try for your signal. It stil…

> You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you. No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case. > If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal? It may or may not be. It depends on the quality of the signal itself, its rel…

>> You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

> No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.

Really, I read it as if it's a bad thing, but a true thing.

Like they're reinforcing my point, that if you have 10,000 qualified candidates and capacity to review 500- grepping for Havard becomes an "easy" way to filter.

Treating people with nuance and balance is not easy to do at scale, you have to bias along some axis, and nearly every axis I can think of is a shitty one- because of course there are fantastic people outside of those axis'

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#220

Post by Cpoll »

steveklabnik wrote: post #206
Cpoll wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This contradicts your earlier statement, " we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidates, " and ignores the criticism: " is it me or is is it you? " Although I suppose you're saying that promising candidates are kept on file for later?

I will be honest, I do not understand what you're saying. It's possible I just need more coffee.

> If [the job applicant materials] didn't get you in the first time, they won't the next time

> we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidates

Under my interpretation , these statements contradict each other. The former implies that a candidate's failure is always the result of their shortcomings. The latter implies that a qualified candidate can be edged out through little fault of their own. The parent poster complained of exactly this; they weren't sure whether they were ineligible or simply edged out.

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