Show HN: MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs
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/
97 points by yathern - 37 comments
The same PC is now shipping with a 480 ssd but is otherwise the same and selling for $300 - $319 depending on the day.
But the main problem is I can't seem to reliably click on a node, it works occasionally but if I find one I want to click on, it either takes ten taps or some I couldn't just open what so ever.
I get asked this a lot, so here's my defense!
ideally it should've been killed the moment it was created to become a lesson for everyone else
https://ohmyz.sh
What is yellow? What is green? What is blue? Are they relative to their CPU column? Relative to the pricing row? Absolute?
Oh - and colors are grey-blue to red, with red being pareto optimal
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.
Now when clicking on the 'dealscope' button there's a little modal which tries to clear it up a bit.
Disagree. Yellow as a progression away from the green/blue (that fade away into gray) towards red is quite obvious.
Two fields that would make the Pareto view easier to trust:
1. New vs refurbished vs unknown. Mini PC listings blur that line constantly. 2. Power draw at idle and under load, even if it starts as a rough bucket. A box that wins on dollars can lose badly if it is going to sit in a homelab for three years.
The CPU/GPU/storage/memory toggle is nice. It makes the site feel like a tiny buying lab instead of another affiliate table.