Episodes HN recommended
The Frontend of the Computer
Jul 18, 2023 • 1 h 04 minBlue Skies Over Mastodon (with Erin Kissane and Tim Bray)
May 2, 2023 • 1 h 41 minOxide and the Chamber of Mysteries
Feb 7, 2023 • 1 h 41 minRevisiting Unikernels
Jan 24, 2023 • 1 h 23 minThe Power of Proto Boards!
Jan 17, 2023 • 1 h 42 minHolistic Boot
Oct 11, 2022 • 1 h 31 minLosing the Signal with Sean Silcoff
Sep 27, 2022 • 1 h 08 minRIP Optane
Aug 9, 2022 • 1 h 43 minDebugging Methodologies
May 17, 2022 • 1 h 30 minTales from the Bringup Lab
Dec 7, 2021 • 1 h 42 minNeXT, Objective-C, and contrasting histories
Jul 6, 2021 • 1 h 11 min
Recent episodes
Books in the Box VI
Oct 29, 2026 • 1 h 21 minDead Printers Tell No Tales
Oct 24, 2026 • 1 h 18 minOxide's $445M Series D
Oct 18, 2026 • 1 h 22 minWorking on Wicked Problems
Oct 16, 2026 • 1 h 26 minFor Want of a Resistor
Sep 16, 2026 • 1 h 24 minEmulating Oxide: How Faux Can You Go?
Sep 11, 2026 • 1 h 25 minAI Detection with Max Spero
Sep 3, 2026 • 1 h 02 minThe Return to the Chamber of Mysteries
Aug 25, 2026 • 1 h 16 minThe Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison
Jul 31, 2026 • 1 h 24 minThe Past, Present, and Future of Digital Storytelling with Ramy Katrib
Jul 23, 2026 • 1 h 05 minThe Oxide 3D Explorer
Jun 27, 2026 • 1 h 15 minThe Hardest Kind of Unsafe Rust
Jun 13, 2026 • 1 h 28 minThis Old Repo: LLMs and the Restoration of BattleTris
Jun 9, 2026 • 1 h 18 minRooting for the Home Team with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
May 27, 2026 • 1 h 02 minThe Tale of Reverso
May 16, 2026 • 1 h 07 minAI in Computer Science Education
May 10, 2026 • 1 h 29 minMechanical Engineering at Oxide [chapter images]
May 7, 2026 • 1 h 25 minAre LLMs Insufficently Lazy?
May 3, 2026 • 1 h 31 minBuilding a Quorum of Trust in the Oxide Rack
Apr 4, 2026 • 1 h 26 minWhen Nine Nines Isn't Enough
Mar 18, 2026 • 1 h 24 minOxide's $200M Series C
Feb 27, 2026 • 1 h 46 minShell Game with Evan Ratliff
Feb 12, 2026 • 1 h 23 minSoftware Engineering Past, Present, and Future with Grady Booch
Feb 7, 2026 • 55 minEngineering Rigor in the LLM Age
Jan 15, 2026 • 1 h 33 minPredictions 2026!!
Jan 8, 2026 • 1 h 39 minOxF 2025 Wrap-Up
Dec 21, 2025 • 1 h 28 minDeath by Uptime
Dec 8, 2025 • 1 h 01 minGrown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug
Nov 26, 2025 • 1 h 21 minFounder vs. Investor with Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann
Nov 22, 2025 • 1 h 29 minFuturelock
Nov 7, 2025 • 1 h 38 min
What HN said
- bcantrillJan 2023When we started the company, we knew it would be a three year build -- and indeed, our first product is in the final stages of development (i.e. EMC/safety certification). We have been very transparent about our progress along the way[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7] -- and our software is essentially all open source, so you can follow along there as well.[8][9][10]
If you are asking "does anyone want a rack-scale computer?" the (short) answer is: yes, they do. The on-prem market has been woefully underserved -- and there are plenty of folks who are sick of Dell/HPE/VMware/Cisco, to say nothing of those who are public cloud borne and wondering if they should perhaps own some of their own compute rather than rent it all.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/holistic-bo...
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-oxide-s...
[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bringup-lab...
[3] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/more-tales-...
[4] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/another-lpc...
[5] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-pragmat...
[6] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-...
[7] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-sidecar...
[8] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron
- bcantrillJun 2023A lot of questions in there! Taking these in order:
1. We aren't making standalone servers: the Oxide compute sled comes in the Oxide rack. So are not (and do not intend to be) a drop in replacement for extant rack mounted servers.
2. We have taken a fundamentally different approach to firmware, with a true root of trust that can attest to the service processor -- which can turn attest to the system software. This prompts a lot of questions (e.g., who attests to the root of trust?), and there is a LOT to say about this; look for us to talk a lot more about this
3. In stark contrast (sadly) to nearly everyone else in the server space, the firmware we are developing is entirely open source. More details on that can be found in Cliff Biffle's 2021 OSFC talk and the Hubris and Humility repos.[0][1][2]
4. Definitely not vaporware! We are in the process of shipping to our first customers; you can follow our progress in our Oxide and Friends podcast.[3]
[0] https://www.osfc.io/2021/talks/on-hubris-and-humility-develo...
[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris
- dreamcompilerSep 2022Thanks for the tip. I learned a lot listening to this [0].
My takeway: Optane was good technology that was killed by Intel's thoroughly wrong-headed marketing. It's cheaper than DRAM but more expensive than flash. And much faster than flash, so it makes the fastest SSDs. But those SSDs are too expensive for everybody except niche server farms who need the fastest possible storage. And that's not a big enough market to get the kinks worked out of a new physics technology and achieve economies of scale.
Intel thought they knew how to fix that: They sold Optane DIMMs to replace RAM. But they also refused to talk about how it worked, be truthful about the fact that it probably had a limited number of write cycles, or describe even one killer use case. So nobody wanted to trust it with mission-critical data.
Worst of all, Intel only made DIMMs for Intel processors that had the controller on the CPU die. ARM? AMD? RISC-V? No Optane DIMMs for you. This was the dealbreaker that made every designer say "Thanks Intel but I'm good with DRAM." As they said on the podcast, Intel wanted Optane to be both proprietary and ubiquitous, and those two things almost never go together. (Well obviously they do. See Apple for example. But the hosts were discussing fundamental enabling technology, not integrated systems.)
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rip-optane/id162593222...
- bcantrillJul 2023We didn't work with an ODM: the ODMs were unwilling to contemplate some of the most basic things we needed (e.g., replacing the BMC with a much lighter weight service processor, having a true root-of-trust, etc.) -- let alone the more things we wanted to do (e.g., our own switch). The compute sled and the switch are both of our own design and look nothing like what you'll find from an ODM; if you're curious in the details, we have discussed them quite a bit in our Oxide and Friends podcast.[0][1][2]
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-...
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-sidecar...
[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bringup-lab...
- bcantrillJun 2023No, we won't: OpenSIL is trying to solve a different problem in that it's still providing for systems that are ultimately booting yet other systems (and therefore have need for interfaces like UEFI, ACPI, etc.) By contrast, we are building a holistic system in which hardware and software are co-designed[0][1] -- we are not seeking to boot arbitrary systems and therefore don't need the abstractions that have been invented for that boundary. We remain strongly supportive of OpenSIL because we believe that this is the kind of innovation that open source platform enablement allows: when the lowest layers of the system are open, we allow for different approaches -- we need not all be confined by PC-era abstractions.
[0] https://www.osfc.io/2022/talks/i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-...
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/holistic-bo...
- bcantrillMay 2023For anyone interested in NeXT, I very strongly recommend Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing"[0]. The book -- written when NeXT was barely breathing and Jobs had been left for dead -- is extraordinary, and I think much more revealing of Jobs than Isaacon's biography of him. (Having read Stross, it is galling how little ink Isaacson dedicates to NeXT, as it's impossible to imagine that Jobs' experience at NeXT didn't shape him upon return to Apple!) If you're curious, we also discussed NeXT on Oxide and Friends, very much informed by Stross's book.[1]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-object...