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

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

#1

Post by yathern »

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/

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

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

#2

Post by walrus01 »

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.

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

#4

Post by yathern »

yodon wrote: post #3

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?

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

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

#6

Post by yodon »

yathern wrote: post #4
yodon wrote: post #3

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?

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 op…

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.

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

#7

Post by yathern »

walrus01 wrote: post #2

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.

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)

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

#8

Post by yathern »

yodon wrote: post #6
yathern wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

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…

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)

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

#9

Post by ozmaverick72 »

yathern wrote: post #8
yodon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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)

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

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

#10

Post by viccis »

yodon wrote: post #6
yathern wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

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…

>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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