IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#261

Post by jll29 » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 1:46 AM UTC

IBM is trying to increase its "AI revenue" through acquisitions, a standard MBA playbook move (although analysts see through this and often ask specifically for "organic" revenue instead to tease that apart from revenue via acquisitions).

In the past, IBM was a technology leader, and probably still has substantial talent excellent inhouse, but from what I'm hearing it has become less appreciative of its researchers and engineers: for instance, my IBM friends lost any patenting activity related bonuses already several years ago.

Also, the Watson debacle (trying to monetize the Watson brand and the (impressive) Watson Jeopardy challenge results by quickly acquiring a bunch of stuff, only to then sell it as "our Watson AI technology") didn't help bolster its reputation, but rather harmed it further.

Companies like IBM and HP should go back to the roots, value science and engineering, take on bold blue-sky projects (don't leave those only to Musk!), and lead by example. Perhaps this could happen, but only with an engineer-scientist at the top instead of professional managers or bean counters (I'm not attacking the perormance of any individual here as I have not been following recent leadership activities of either company recently).

It is unlikely, IMHO, that an acquired company can change the culture of the acquirer. The only time I've seen this happening was Nokia benefitting Microsoft's culture, but that's because they made Nokia's CEO Microsoft's CEO, which is not going to happen with any likelihood in IBM's case.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#262

Post by datadrivenangel » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 1:48 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #184

rank0 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand people’s beef with IBM. They have been responsible for incredible R&D within computing. I even LIKE redhat/fedora! HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this acquisition and I also don’t understand why their engineers are seen as “special”…

IBM was taken over by bean counters years ago. There were researchers and others that would literally skip being in or find a way to avoid bean counters when they walked through IBM Research Labs (like Almaden Research Center) years ago (heard from multiple people years back that were working on contracts/etc there - mainly academics). Also, IBM has been extremely ageist in their "layoff" policies. They also have dec…

I knew a guy who was laid off from IBM specifically for being older, which came out years later as part of the class action lawsuit...

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#263

Post by hughesjj » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 1:55 AM UTC

NomDePlum wrote: post #201

renegade-otter wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err" statements. Also, refactoring my logging statements so I could see the chain of events seemed like work I rarely had to do in other languages. It's a language the designers of which - with ALL due respect - clearly have not built a modern large application in decades.

I understand were you are coming from but I actually like the explicit error handling in Golang. Things being explicit reduces complexity for me a lot and I find it easier to spot and resolve potential issues. It's definitely something that I can understand not working for everyone. I agree on the logging point but my experience was the explicit error handling and with good test coverage meant we rarely got into situ…

Everything is explicit until someone decides to introduce a panic() somewhere... (I get that exists in more or less any language)

That said, in practice I see it following a similar philosophy to java checked exceptions, just with worse semantics.

Personally, I don't like high-boilerplate languages because they train me to start glossing over code, and it's harder for me to keep context when faced with a ton of boilerplate.

I don't hate go. I don't love it either. It's really good at a few things (static binaries, concurrency, backwards and forwards compatibility). I hate the lack of a fully-fleshed out standard library, the package management system is still a bit wonky (although much improved), and a few other aesthetic or minor gripes.

That said there's no language I really love, save maybe kotlin, which has the advantage of the superb java standard library, without all the structural dogma that used to (or still does) plague the language (OOO only, one public class per file, you need to make an anonymous interface to pass around functions, oh wait now we have a streaming API but its super wonky with almost c++ like compilation error messages, hey null pointers are a great idea right oh wait no okay just toss some lombok annotations everywhere).

End of the day though a lot of talented people are golang first and sometimes you just gotta go where the industry does regardless of personal preference. There's a reason scientists are still using FORTRAN after all these years, and why so much heavy math is done in python of all things (yeah yeah I know Cython is a thing and end of the day numpy etc abstract a lot of it out of the way, but a built in csv and json module combined with the super easy syntax made it sticky for data scientists for a reason)

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#264

Post by JohnMakin » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 1:59 AM UTC

JojoFatsani wrote: post #248

JohnMakin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an extremely early user and owner of a very large-scale Vault deployment on Kubernetes. Worked with a few of their sales engineers closely on it - was always told early on that although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart, they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances (because of "security" which never really made sense their reasoning). During every meeting and conference I'd as…

(I have no idea what your infra is so don’t take this as prescriptive) My feeling is that for the average company operating in a (single) cloud, there’s no reason to use vault when you can just used AWS Secret Manager or the equivalent in azure or GCE and not have to worry about fucking Etcd quorums and so forth. Just make simple api calls with the IAM creds you already have.

ime that’s a way better product to use for secrets management unless you’re trying to do very advanced CA stuff.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#265

Post by mixmastamyk » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 2:00 AM UTC

sureglymop wrote: post #164

calgoo wrote: post #49

Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.

Regarding Red Hat, I dearly hope someone will replace the slow complicated mess that is ansible. It's crazy that this seems to be the best there is...

I wrote a tool similar to ansible in the old days. We both started about the same time, so wasn't really a goal to compete with it. Later I noticed they had some type of funding from Red Hat, which dulled my enthusiasm a bit. Then Docker/containers started hitting it big and I figured it would be the end of the niche and stopped.

Interesting that folks are still using it, though I'm not sure of the market share.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#266

Post by hughesjj » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 2:04 AM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #224

aaomidi wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because other language just hide errors from the user. I think the reason people find go a bit annoying with the error condition is because go actually treats errors as a primary thought, not an after thought like Python, Java.

I assume you're talking about languages with exceptions when saying "other language just hide errors from the user." I think that's a gross over-simplification of exception-based error handling. I generally do prefer explicit, but there are plenty of cases where exceptions are clearly elegant and more understandable. My preference is a language like Elixir where most methods have an error-code returning version and a…

I've never gotten the explicit argument. Java checked exceptions are also part of the function signature/interface and nothing prevents one from making a language where all exceptions are checked then just doing

    try {
       maybeError := FunctionThrowingValueError()
    } catch (ValueError e) {
       // do stuff
    }

I get at the end of the day it's all semantics, but personally I kinda like the error-specific syntax. If you want to do the normal return path, that's fine, but I prefer the semantics of Rust's Result type (EITHER a result OR an error may be set).

To each their own, it's not something I really worry about.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#267

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 2:05 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#268

Post by ZealousIdeal » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 2:10 AM UTC

geodel wrote: post #257

ZealousIdeal wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crux of the problem is the SV model is completely broken and leads to these cycles. wish it were more about sustainable progression and not rapid half-baked innovation to achieve paydays for greedy founders/investors

Huh, they won't get pay day if no one use their products. And there are plenty of examples of failed products. If people have idea and execution capability for sustainable progression they can very well try outside the valley. It is not like companies don't start outside valley.

which is why the majority of the startups fail and then a lucky unicorn comes and funds the next cycle. look at how many poor ideas got massive investment on the bet of payout; so many blockchain companies and none solved a real world problem. lots of potential investment in things that could have greatly helped many more people in the world, but instead invested into a technology looking for a problem.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#269

Post by roland-s » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 2:16 AM UTC

JojoFatsani wrote: post #247

redserk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unnecessarily dismissive. While Hashicorp hasn’t been exciting for a while, I fail to see how an acquisition from IBM will invigorate excitement, much less even a neutral reaction from many developers. Hashicorp had a huge hand in defining and popularizing the modern DevOps procedures we now declare as best practices. That’s a torch to hold that would be very difficult for a business like IBM. Perhaps I misse…

Do you mean Terraform, not Ansible?

IBM owns Ansible, redserk is saying Terraform will go a similar route. Although I don't see what they mean by core being lower priority than paid. The paid features are all available for free via AWX, which is the open source upstream of the paid product AAP.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#270

Post by nine_k » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 2:16 AM UTC

epgui wrote: post #212

janosd wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After having written probably over 100k lines of Go code, my impression is that Go is simple, but not easy. The language has very few features to learn, but that results in a lot of boilerplate code and there are more than a few footguns burried in the language itself. (My favorite [1]) I find it very hard to write expressive, easy to read code and more often than not I see people using massive switch-case statements…

I’ve always found that the Go language is simple in all the ways that don’t matter. (In contrast to languages like Haskell and Clojure, which are simple in most of the ways that matter.)

Compilation speed matters, among other things, and monomorphization is often costly.