Frankly, for me, "Jessie and Bryan are going to start selling computers" is enough for me to get excited about it. I'm not sure I could give you an in-depth rundown, because well, I'm not privy to any information, and obviously this announcement is a bit light on details. Some quotes from both of their posts that I think are important:
> hardware and software should each be built with the other in mind.
> even as the world is moving (or has moved) to elastic, API-driven computing, there remain good reasons to run on one’s own equipment!
> Over the last year, I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time talking with folks who are currently running workloads on premises. The consensus from all my conversations has been that everyone setting up infrastructure themselves is in a great deal of pain and they have been largely neglected by any existing vendor. All these folks have very good reasons for running on premises that include security, strategic reasons like latency, specialized workloads, or the reality that the unit economics of running at their scale in the cloud are unsustainable.
> the world needed a company to develop and deliver integrated, hyperscaler-class infrastructure to the broader market — that we needed to start a computer company.
> Hyperscalers like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have what I like to call “infrastructure privilege” since they long ago decided they could build their own hardware and software to fulfill their needs better than commodity vendors. We are working to bring that same infrastructure privilege to everyone else!
> could we find an investor who saw what we saw in Oxide? Fortunately, the answer to this question had been emphatic and unequivocal: [yes]
About 30% of the top HN posts every day are advertisements. Click on the "past" link at the top, go back each day. It's either a company or a software project trying to get eyeballs. And why not? This site exists because a business person wanted to show off their investments.
It definitely happens, but the moderators have been good at keeping that to a minimum. And even with guerilla advertising, the comments can offer critiques of features, or suggest alternatives. That's much more helpful than pure astroturfing when all the comments are pro-product in question.