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Show HN: MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs

(minipcs.zip)
45 points by yathern 4 days ago|21 comments
The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my "homelab" (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they're not often strongly categorized).

Quick blog post here: https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/

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walrus01 3 days ago
The same N150 CPU mini PC with 12GB RAM I bought on Amazon a year ago seems to have considerably increased in price, as a result of the RAM price surge... Even though what's soldered onto its motherboard is probably the cheapest possible ddr4-2666 or similar.
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yathern 3 days ago
For sure - prices are bizarre right now - though if you sort by memory, there's some holdout units that have like 32GB of memory for $250 (though other poor stats)
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dthakur 3 days ago
Nice work. Clustering around N95/N100/N150 visible.
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pockybum522 3 days ago
This is extremely useful and cool. I dream of having visualizations like this for anything I buy that has specifications.
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yourusername 3 days ago
Why do you use a TLD that is commonly blocked?
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pockybum522 3 days ago
Kind of crazy to me that anyone would block an entire TLD. This timeline is bizarre. How often and with what services do you find zip blocked? Genuinely curious
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yourusername 3 days ago
My employer blocks it on our work computers. Looking around it seems like this is commonly done because one of the main uses of the .zip tld is to spread malware by faking links to zip files using "/" look alike characters and other URLs that look like download links to zip files.
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ErroneousBosh 3 days ago
Well by that token we should probably also block the .com TLD since that is actually an executable file suffix.
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yathern 3 days ago
https://luke.zip/posts/zip-defense/

I get asked this a lot, so here's my defense!

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yodon 3 days ago
It would help if you actually explained what the color means.

What is yellow? What is green? What is blue? Are they relative to their CPU column? Relative to the pricing row? Absolute?

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yathern 3 days ago
Colors are distance to the pareto frontier for the given setting for "dealscope"! Easily noticed when axis and color are set to the same dimension (EG CPU) - but setting to different things allows you to visualize two dimensions (three, with price) without needing a 3D chart. I found it really useful to find outliers, but I realize it's a bit nonstandard!

Oh - and colors are grey-blue to red, with red being pareto optimal

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yodon 3 days ago
It's great that you understand the chart. Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us. We read green then yellow then red as a sign of DECREASING fit. And a bunch of blues next to that green to red progression reads as "no data" or "not relevant" or something.

It's great that you have the data. I'm sure that took a lot of time to obtain. Spending a few more percent of your total time making the presentation of the data intuitive to others is almost certainly the highest ROI thing you can do at this point, if you want your site to be useful enough to get enough visitors to pay for the cost of acquiring the data.

Feel free to tell me that red is the lowest Pareto value and that's why you made the frontier red, or whatever. I'll still respond that the details of the presentation matters enormously to adoption, and the current presentation is very far from optimally intuitive to those of us who didn't personally develop the data.

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viccis 3 days ago
>Yellow being more optimal than green is very far from intuitive to the rest of us

Disagree. Yellow as a progression away from the green/blue (that fade away into gray) towards red is quite obvious.

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pockybum522 3 days ago
Yeah. It was so obvious to me I didn't think about it until I read the comments. Makes sense that it would trip some people up, though.
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yathern 3 days ago
Oh for sure - your feedback is totally helpful, I agree the colors are not obvious (especially red being good), perhaps my tone sounded dismissive but that was not the intention at all - symtom of a quick response from my phone! I'll definitely work on improving the readability of the colors and what it means (tricky to find the balance between nerdily over explaining how it works)
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ozmaverick72 3 days ago
If there was a key explaining what the colors meant that would be great. And maybe the option to select colors or pick between a couple of alternatives - i think in western culture green is good but in Chinese i think they normally think of red as the best - just being able to swap between those two defaults would probably be enough - thanks for your hard work - much appreciated
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kristopolous 3 days ago
the color allocation is closer to chinese symbolism than western. You don't need to change it, just describe it somewhere, probably with a rainbow strip, maybe bottom right, like a scale symbol on a map.
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yathern 3 days ago
An earlier version included a rainbow color scale but it felt cluttered - I'll definitely bring it back in some capacity for sure - thanks for the feedback
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Gathering6678 3 days ago
Failed to load listings (500)
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yathern 3 days ago
Fixed!
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pixel_popping 3 days ago
500.