Live data from Hacker News

IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

reuters.com

321–330 of 391 posts

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#321
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misunderstood my point. RSUs became taxable at the $80 stock price for many. Depending on where you're based that could mean you owe(d) anywhere from from $22 - $38 per share in taxes. At the top end of that range, if you're still holding any stock, this acquisition has just permanently crystalised a capital loss for you. There's no upside that gets you above what you owe/paid in taxes. There are many many peo…

I don't know how pre-public to IPO RSUs work but let's do some math assuming IPO day is "day when RSUs vest": IPO day and you get 1000 RSUs unlocked/vested. Share price is $80. You made 80k gains. For simplicity let's say you owed 40K in taxes. One of two things happens: - Hasihcorp auto sells to cover and you get 500 less shares. - You need to pay your taxes on your own and earmark 40K. Let's pick the easy one: If H…

I don't need to make any assumptions about anything here, other former colleagues have gone through the specifics in other replies. Nothing is auto-sold at IPO to cover taxes, a maximum of 10% of what had vested was allowed to be sold before the 6mo lockup expired. There was a total of a few weeks before a combination of trading blackout window, lockup, and market crash conspired to have make it easy to be underwater if you hadn't elected to sell everything you could coming into the IPO.

_A lot_ of people ended up with a loss.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nomad has a remarkably strong community for it's size. I'm almost positive it will continue to live in some format, even if completely hard-forked. I know if nobody else does anything I will do something myself, personally. I love Kubernetes, however I feel like things like Nomad and Mesos have a space to exist in as well. Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. :)

> Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. Same. I'm not a fan of the recent licensing changes and probably won't use it for any new installations, but Nomad enabled me to be an entire ops team AND do all my other startupy engineer duties as well with minimal babysitting. It really just works, and works fantastically for what it is. Nomad is like the perfect mix of functional and easy to manage.

The question is what to replace it with?

There doesn't seem to be enough forces to create a MPL fork but at the same time we have a gap between "Docker Compose is enough" and running Kubernetes. Because there are many situations where going Kubernetes (or even lighter k0s, k3s type setups) does not make any sense.

My guess is no organisation which can afford to dedicate resources to contribute or create a fork need Nomad. So we end up with a big gap in the ecosystem.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#323
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think go makes more sense if you imagine spending more time reading MRs and code than writing it. Standard go error handling maximises for locality. You don't see many "long range" effects where you have to go and read the rest of the code to understand what's going to happen. Ideally everything you need is in the diff in front of you. Stuff like defer() schedules de-alloc "near" to where things get allocated, you…

Thanks for the Close() example, that's a nice solution, although would it work if you wanted to handle an error (not just log it?) > Standard go error handling maximises for locality. You don't see many "long range" effects where you have to go and read the rest of the code to understand what's going to happen. Ideally everything you need is in the diff in front of you. I'm assuming you're comparing to exceptions. I…

Good points, I think it's fair to claim Result and Option are technically better (when combined with the necessary language features and compile-time checks).

Re: Close() errors yeah most times you would be better off writing the code in place if you really need to handle them. You can make a little helper if you find yourself repeating the same dance a lot. Usually there's not much you can do about close errors though.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by different tools, but an open standard instead. God, please no. The worst thing about all these tools is the terrible formats they keep choosing. Given the directions we’ve (“cutting edge” programmers and server ops folks) chosen to go instead, leaving XML behind was a big mistake. I’d prefer something better, but yaml and json are so terrible tha…

You'd write in a language designed for humans, and that would get translated into a language for computers. In other words, JSON. What are your reasons for disliking JSON?

JSON isn't designed for humans. It's designed, originally, to be eval()d in a browser. HOCON is a JSON-type-system compatible language designed for human config files:

https://hocon.dev

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#326
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misunderstood my point. RSUs became taxable at the $80 stock price for many. Depending on where you're based that could mean you owe(d) anywhere from from $22 - $38 per share in taxes. At the top end of that range, if you're still holding any stock, this acquisition has just permanently crystalised a capital loss for you. There's no upside that gets you above what you owe/paid in taxes. There are many many peo…

I don't know how pre-public to IPO RSUs work but let's do some math assuming IPO day is "day when RSUs vest": IPO day and you get 1000 RSUs unlocked/vested. Share price is $80. You made 80k gains. For simplicity let's say you owed 40K in taxes. One of two things happens: - Hasihcorp auto sells to cover and you get 500 less shares. - You need to pay your taxes on your own and earmark 40K. Let's pick the easy one: If H…

    > No one company should be more than 15% of your portfolio. Even the one you work at.
Tell that to the guy who went all-in for NVidia employee share purchase plan and is worth more than 50M USD. (I think it was a Register article posted here recently.) Sometimes the gamble is worth it. That said, for every one of those once-in-a-lifetime stories, there are many, many more about engineers who walked away from post-IPO start-ups with very little wealth gained. So many have posted here before, it just isn't worth it.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#327
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful and profitable; glader still that they got their payout. Sadly I echo your sentiment about the future, as someone who has heard second-hand about the quality of work at modern Redhat. I am wondering how many more rounds of consolidation are left until there is no more space to innovate and we o…

It always amazing me how people play telephone with Red Hat and how bad the quality of life is post IBM. When they show the service awards they don’t even cover 5 years because they don’t have all day. If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave. Oh but they don’t innovate…

    > Oh but they don’t innovate anymore.
IBM was #4 in the US last year for patents here: https://www.ificlaims.com/rankings-top-50-2023.htm

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#328
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal opinion is it was a company for crack monkeys. Consul, Vault and Packer have been nothing but pain and misery for me over the last few years. The application of these technologies has been nothing but a loss of ROI and sanity on a promise. And don't get me started on Terraform, which is a promise but rarely delivers. It's bad enough that a whole ecosystem appeared around it (like terragrunt) to patch up t…

When a massive ecosystem springs up around a product, that means it’s wildly successful, actually.

Yeah I'm not saying it's not successful. It's just shit!

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#329
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 took away the ability of CentOS to be a free and trivial to swap-in alternative to the paid product RedHat Enterprise. That RedHat was already in financial trouble due to self-cannibalizing their own paid product is irrelevant; emotionally, “IBM” – not “RedHat” – made the decision to stop charging $0 for their custom enterprise patchsets and release trains, and so IBM will always be the focus of community ire abo…

* Red Hat wasn't ever "in financial trouble" -- their revenue line was up-and-to-the-right for a ridiculous number of consecutive quarters. Even when they missed overall earnings estimates, it was rarely by much and they still usually beat EPS estimates for the quarter.

* IBM had little to do with Red Hat's maneuvers around CentOS (I worked at Red Hat for several years and still have friends there, and nothing anybody there said publicly about CentOS in 2020 or 2023 was materially different from things people there were saying about it internally in 2012). Some people have tried to blame IBM for a general culture shift but as far as I've seen, every bit of the CentOS debacle was laid squarely at the feet of Red Hat staff by most in this industry -- as it should have been, since most of those involved were employed there well before IBM bought the company.

IBM's reputation as an aging dinosaur was well-earned long before it bought Red Hat, and continues to be earned outside it. That earned reputation was why they bought RHT in the first place: IBM Cloud market share was (and still is) declining and they wanted a jumpstart in both revenue and engineering credibility from OpenShift in particular.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in particular did you find difficult building a maintainable codebase in Golang? Not quite understanding the boilerplate reference. Code generation in Golang is something I've found removed a lot of boilerplate.

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 am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err" statements.
I don't write Go, but I have seen this a lot when reading Go. It seems hard to escape. The same is true for pure C. You really need to check every single function output for errors, else errors compound, and it is much harder to diagnose failures. When I write Java with any kind of I/O, I need careful, tight exception handling so that the exception context will be narrow enough to allow me to diagnose failures after unexpected failures. Error handling is hard to do well in any language.
Post reply on HN