311–320 of 522 posts
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Not finding a ton of information about it, was curious about it too. But the "smallest system" seems huge, like 16 sleds and a HN comment from 2023 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840 ) says: > An oxide rack has a minimum cost of something like 600k not including all the infra you need to run a rack, maintenance, and then needing to upgrade So maybe not super useful for people who are looking to do some h…
Wow so really for F500 and such
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Oh, come on. Administrative overhead is a reality of business everywhere and at every level; the idea that to manage an organization somehow necessarily impairs it is absurd. So is purporting falsely to eliminate that overhead on behalf of others, when basic professional competence instead involves for oneself learning to minimize it - to dispose of it, not by panicking or catastrophizing or sweeping it under a rug,…
I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance reviews, to Oxide. The culture difference is night and day. The level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta just doesn't exist here. By the way, I received every rating from Greatly Exceeds (including an additional equity grant) down to Meets Most, and the rating I got overall had very little correlation with either effort or impact. I got Meets Most for some of the…
The culture difference between Meta and any startup will be night and day. People who are self interested min-maxxers don't join startups. Not dealing with "corporate politics" has to be in the top 5 reasons anyone leaves FAANG to join a startup. That has nothing to do with Oxide's comp structure.
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I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance reviews, to Oxide. The culture difference is night and day. The level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta just doesn't exist here. By the way, I received every rating from Greatly Exceeds (including an additional equity grant) down to Meets Most, and the rating I got overall had very little correlation with either effort or impact. I got Meets Most for some of the…
> I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance reviews, to Oxide. The culture difference is night and day. The level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta just doesn't exist here. The culture difference between Meta and any startup will be night and day. People who are self interested min-maxxers don't join startups. Not dealing with "corporate politics" has to be in the top 5 reasons anyone leaves FAANG to joi…
Oh, sure! Now tell me another one. The idea that startups don't have politics is - well, I'll say it is extremely comedic, and we'll leave it at that.
Think about it for a minute. I'm not questioning the existence of the pipeline here described, and no one is questioning the existence of many pressing reasons for anyone at the FAANG "top of funnel" to want to flow along that pipeline about as quickly as is achievable.
But those "reasons" have effects on the people who experience them, because humans have emotions and psychologies and other such inconvenient externalities, and for like cause those effects are not instantly and perfectly ameliorated in every case by a simple change of environment.
Can you not straightforwardly see how this might produce some extremely adverse results, in a social and sociological sense? And how overt, documented, attributable, and discoverable personnel processes, far from some unreasonable burden, might serve a broadly beneficial role in such circumstances?
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like us old assholes were saying when the cloud really started to take off: "this is nuts, it's just someone else's computer! and they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing!" Now a lot of the things that were done pre-cloud were done in bad ways, and I'm not saying that we were right about those things. Having APIs for provisioning and monitoring are far better th…
> they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing! I hope you can see that this is a logical fallacy known as "zero-sum thinking". It is not only possible for a business to profit while lowering prices, it is universal throughout the economy. Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home. Bakeries radically u…
> Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home.
This is because at home, you have an elastic need for tomatoes. One week you need a few, the next week you need none, the next week you need a lot. In that case, yes, growing your own tomatoes would be very silly. (This part of the analogy works with on-demand instances.)
However, if you aren't a home, but you're a busy restaurant, you're not buying tomatoes from the grocery store. You have a regular, fairly fixed capacity, and so you go with a produce vendor who's able to serve that need at a decent price. Part of the reason you're able to get a cheaper price is through volume and due to the regular-ness of the business. (this part of the analogy works with reserved instances.)
Okay, so let's move from tomatoes to the actual building of a restaurant itself. Similar to a reserved instance, renting a building is a decent way to get started with less capital, and you have fairly consistent capacity requirements. But at some point, you realize what McDonalds did: owning the building and land beneath it ends up being a great deal at certain scale. Because that ends up being cheaper still, in the long run. This is closer to on-prem. (Okay at this point this analogy is getting pretty silly but it was fun to try and work through it...)
So, the trick is, for a lot of organizations, they could realize the benefits of owning their own hardware, but to get back to your original analogy, running your own hardware comes with its own set of costs that may make it not worth it. You have to have staff to operate everything, you have to manage all of the various supplier relationships, keep track of software licensing fees, etc etc etc. Even with all of this, as my sibling comment shows, often this can be cheaper than using the cloud.
But one way of looking at Oxide is, we are making it so that it's simpler to own your own hardware, thanks to all of the integration work we do. You don't have to manage a ton of vendor relationships, you have "one throat to choke," as they say. You don't have to keep track of software licensing fees, there are none. You don't need to build out your own software to put the whole thing together, we give it to you. Etc.
So yes, just like a household is best served by going to the supermarket, individuals aren't ever going to buy Oxide. But there's a lot more out there than just households. And larger organizations have fundamentally different needs than they do.
> The main reason people think their on-prem is cheaper than cloud is that they are bad at accounting.
I mean, there's also base accounting stuff that differs significantly between the two, like opex vs capex spend. Not that I'm an expert in that, mind you.
Lots of praise not much skepticism, so what is the exit here? $100M is a lot of money investors want to see returned of the total amount raised of almost $200M? Remember Oxide is VC backed so there must be some strings attached here, is it an IPO or an acquisition for an exit or just staying private?
I don't get it. They're a hardware integrator with a secret sauce management layer on top. I like anything on-prem but this seems a bit hyped. Slick website and appears to have a very good team though.
they produce a private cloud in the form of racks you can buy then just plug in to power and ethernet and run. also, they did a bunch of work so the OOB management isn't fucking terrible, and it uses way less power per FLOP because they bothered to, for example, "make the fans work properly".
Dell will sell you a thousand servers you can then buy racks for, then rack yourself, then buy switches from Aruba, then plug all the switches in to all the computers, then pay VMWare for an vm-cluster-OS, then you can install that, then when something goes wrong you get to call up Dell, Aruba and VMWare and have them all tell you it's someone else's fault.
you...don't get the difference between these two situations?
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Is the software open-source with reproducible builds of any runtime binaries? Oxide has been remarkably transparent about the development and architecture of critical system components. We can only hope they succeed and inspire others to follow their transparency lead.
Open source is a requirement but not the only one. There are countless examples of companies building integrated solutions based off of open source projects that, when they went bankrupt, there was nobody to pick up the available pieces and continue moving the stack forward. Just pointing out that open source is not this magical escape hatch that some people think (at least not in corporate environments).
https://www.illumos.org/docs/about/who/
(Listing all projects using ZFS or DTrace as "who uses Illumos" is cheating.)
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Salary and equity have nothing to do with what you "deserve", only what you're able to negotiate.
Would love to engage in a discussion with you on this. How would you describe "deserve" in the sense of compensation? I agree with your premise that what you get is ultimately bound by the ceiling of the payer's generosity and your ability to negotiate. But what sorts of things input into the function of "deserve"?
How much equity or salary you get in a company is a function of supply/demand and the marginal product of your labor. I would say there are probably fewer CEOs who can take a company from startup to unicorn status than there are really good founding engineers out there, so CEOs tend to get more equity in a company. Sometimes the founding engineer knows something that nobody else in the world does, so their equity reflects that. It's also a reflection of how much risk the engineer is willing to take on (they'll probably take a salary cut to be a founding engineer, and they also risk the company randomly running out of runway and finding themself suddenly unemployed).
But it has nothing to do with what you deserve. Maybe if the CEO/President is a sentimental type, he'll award you equity based on how much he feels you deserve but ultimately it's about supply and demand.
If a CEO puts in 90 hours a week at a tobacco company while his engineers put in 20 hours a week, does he deserve lots of money (and therefore a more comfortable life) because he puts more effort into killing people? Or does he deserve every bad thing that happens to him because he decided to spend his limited time on this earth making it a worse place?
I am wondering what they have on Roadmap and if Zen 6 will come. Their AMD EPYC™ 7713P is 4+ years old already. Or is Hardware performance not a main focus for Oxide but Software that came with it? In 2027 - 2030, We will have 256 Core Zen 7 CPU with PCIe 6.0 or 7.0 SSD and Network. If Liquid Cooling ever come to Oxide we are looking at 5 - 10x the compute power of its current hardware. Somewhere along the line a Sin…
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The issue is, you're speaking from the position of the organization itself. Yes, staff work is just as important as line work. The issue with perf isn't that it's staff work, it's that people who are ostensibly hired to do line work are forced to do staff work just to keep their jobs. And sure, you can argue "tough, that's just life," but it's not hard to see why people resent it. They want to be writing code, not pu…
I see why people resent it; I'm saying they're foolish to do so. Why should I not seek involvement in staff work that determines so much of my future? Why should I not make myself responsible for the conduct of the business within the scope of my role, rather than just the parts which I happen to like and enjoy? And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide, I really can't see…
Okay, sure. I am also not a "I only want to put my head down and code" person either.
> And since you can't seriously mean me to believe performance is not evaluated at Oxide,
Not formally, no. Because there are no levels, no corresponding salary bands, there's no need to have a formal process, with all of the justification work that has to go in from the employee, and all of the reading and evaluating all of that stuff from management.
It is true that if you don't do your job, you'll be let go. However, that's a conversation that would happen between you and Bryan/Steve, not an annual or quarterly process with all of the paperwork and such that those formal processes demand.
Instead, we simply do our jobs, and get paid our salary.
It sounds like it isn't an environment for you, and that's okay.