Hacker News: harpratap

New comment by harpratap in "Google removes AI health summaries"

harpratap — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 06:14:54 +0000

Dental and vanity surgeries aren't happening in a vacuum. There are baseline costs eg. anesthesia, recovery medications, medical machinery etc which are all bloated due to the rest of industry not being under price pressure (rising tide lift all boats)

It's similar to how AI data center buildout race is raising the prices for consumer electronics in 2026 and beyond. The suppliers have no incentive to sell lower cost products to tiny niche

New comment by harpratap in "Google removes AI health summaries"

harpratap — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 01:16:00 +0000

Because insurance companies incentivize upward price momentum. The ones who innovate and bring the prices down are not rewarded for their efforts. Health inflation is higher than headline inflation because of this absence of price pressure

New comment by harpratap in "The race to replace Redis"

harpratap — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 02:23:02 +0000

This is very good use case of micro-transactions. If AWS makes $100 off Redis, they should be pay back X% to Redis project, from which the money is distributed to contributors based on how important their contributions were. Also Redis project is also supposed to pay back to the software components and 3rd party libraries it uses, so C project gets a fair share of the pie contributed back to them as well.

New comment by harpratap in "How I listen to music"

harpratap — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 11:01:58 +0000

Wrote something on similar lines[1]. To understand a song completely I needed to dig deep in the artist's life & philosophy, the same with lyrics. I stopped trying to relate and match my existing life experience with the artist and explicitly tried understanding what the artist was trying to convey, dissolving my own understanding of what I thought it should sound like. Never went back to listening music the old way.

[1] - https://harpratap.com/2023/05/31/on-how-to-listen-Nusrat-fat...

New comment by harpratap in "Fly Kubernetes"

harpratap — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 04:08:10 +0000

Is that really a problem in Cloud environments where you would typically use a Cluster Autoscaler? GKE has "optimize-utilization" profile or you could use a descheduler to binpack your nodes better

New comment by harpratap in "Fly Kubernetes"

harpratap — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 04:05:04 +0000

Wouldn't the network cost be absurd in such case? Not only the pod-to-pod communication cost skyrocket, all the heartbeats, health checks, metrics, daemonsets pinging each other will probably end up costing more than the CPU and Memory

New comment by harpratap in "Fly Kubernetes"

harpratap — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 03:59:32 +0000

GKE Autopilot is pretty much useless, very few cases where it actually turns out cheaper than simply using Cluster Autoscaler + Node autoprovisioning. Not only is the pricing absolutely absurd, they don't even allow normal K8s bursting behavior (requests need to be equal to limits) which means you not only end up paying more than regular K8s cluster but now also need to highly overprovision your pods

New comment by harpratap in "Vendor lock-in in the observability space"

harpratap — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 02:26:26 +0000

Datadog allows you to export all of this but I don't see how that's any useful. You can't really port Datadog dashboard to let's say Grafana easily. The query languages they use do not have 1:1 mapping, the way dashboards are organized and the different visualization tools you get are not same either

New comment by harpratap in "Vendor lock-in in the observability space"

harpratap — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 02:23:09 +0000

> unless your a whale they give zero fucks about giving you any flexibility on price.

Even the flexible pricing they offer ends up being a sham. It just seems better on paper but you end up paying nearly the same because they have a really complicated billing model where they give you free stuff with Infra hosts, once you switch away from this model you stop getting those freebies, so your Infra hosts might cost less now but everything else is more expensive now. The house always wins!

New comment by harpratap in "The Snapdragon X Elite aims to make your Windows PC better than a Mac"

harpratap — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 09:32:49 +0000

> The company also noted that it'll offer 50% better multithreaded performance than an Apple M2, but didn't speak on single-core CPU performance.

Single threaded performance - https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1716904403259834529

VS Apple M2 Max: 14% faster at 30% less power

VS Intel i9-13980HK: 1% faster at 70% less power

New comment by harpratap in "Optimizing For Feelings - On seeking meaning beyond metrics"

harpratap — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 06:00:18 +0000

How do you know the feeling(s) you are optimizing for are the right ones? A murderer is also optimizing for a feeling.

New comment by harpratap in "Cuber: Deploy your apps on Kubernetes easily"

harpratap — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 04:51:43 +0000

This is not a bare-metal vs Cloud comparison, the Cuber PaaS is supposed to run on anything including cloud based on their docs. So when they say "save 80% on cloud costs" I am assuming they mean for eg. save 80% on using Cuber on GCP compared to deploying same workload on GKE.

It would be very absurd to claim something like - I was using i9-13900KS but realized I could run the same workload on my raspberry pi, but hey I also used this packaging tool in the process therefore I saved 80% costs because of the packaging tool.

New comment by harpratap in "Cuber: Deploy your apps on Kubernetes easily"

harpratap — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 10:04:31 +0000

> We had 100% uptime and we saved 80% on cloud costs.

Is there a source on such bold claims?

New comment by harpratap in "MapReduce, TensorFlow, Vertex: Google's bet to avoid repeating history in AI"

harpratap — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 03:05:36 +0000

GKE in general seems to be doing better than EKS though. They have a lot of things right and EKS seems to be playing catch-up. For example if you look at any Multi-cluster Kubernetes setup by AWS it's just a giant duct-tape rather than a ground-up solution. GKE worked on fundamentals first like multi-cluster endpoints, multi-cluster services, multi-cluster ingress, multi-cluster config-sync and now bringing it all together under GKE Enterprise.

New comment by harpratap in "x86 is dead, long live x86"

harpratap — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 02:17:50 +0000

It takes very long time for going from preview to actual production usage for anyone. We had T2D preview access more than a year ago, it took several months to get enough stock in Tokyo region (US always gets preference in such cases whenever a new machine type comes out). GCP already has Zen4 in preview for some US customers. Also, us being one of the largest GCP customers in Japan made things even slower

New comment by harpratap in "x86 is dead, long live x86"

harpratap — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 02:14:40 +0000

Yes, I point this out in the article too. Which CPU will perform better is heavily dependent on your workloads, so I refrain from relying 100% on synthetic benchmarks and directly ran canaries in production instead. It's definitely possible Ice Lake is superior for your workload than Milan

New comment by harpratap in "x86 is dead, long live x86"

harpratap — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 17:16:11 +0000

The dead thing is Intel (x86) and the successor is AMD (x86) as opposed to ARM in our case. Isn't it correct?

New comment by harpratap in "x86 is dead, long live x86"

harpratap — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:49:12 +0000

Cloud world is really slow. Imagine writing about Zen3 Milan in Aug 2023 when AMD has already announced Zen4c Bergamo. Actually we were "ahead of the curve" since we got access to T2D before it was made publicly available in Tokyo region, and even then it took several months to get enough capacity in Tokyo to fully migrate our production Kubernetes cluster.

I really wish we could test out RISC-V SoCs from the likes of tenstorrent, but it's a long journey

New comment by harpratap in "x86 is dead, long live x86"

harpratap — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:41:23 +0000

Thanks, that's a really insightful article!

> Since you are using Go and targeting a specific modern CPU, you may also get a measurable benefit from setting GOAMD64=v3

That's actually a long pending open issue in our backlog :)

New comment by harpratap in "x86 is dead, long live x86"

harpratap — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:11:59 +0000

That is true. But in cloud our hands our tied, we cannot really switch from one one generation to another so easily. GCP has so far never launched a new chip while keeping the price same or lower. We did same cost/perf analysis on newer generation chips like Ice Lake from Intel and even Milan from AMD in the form of N2D, but both are quiet expensive for the performance uplift they provide. The unique thing about T2D is that the price is competitive with 10 year old E2, which has been the case only for ARM based CPUs like Graviton and Ampere Altra (T2A from GCP)