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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking of a triple Pi-4B 2GB to setup a cluster so that could be a gift idea for younger people (or middle-age branch out techies like me).

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I got a Pi as a gift once, it was neat but I didn't really know what to do with it.

I like the idea of getting people a pihole set. Pi zero. W with case and heat sync. Low power headless power-supply. I run mine with a 500ma wall wart.

Pihole is a game changer. Giving you back control of your network by blocking ad networks and allowing blocking of networks and services that don’t operate in the user’s interests.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20264911

I was looking at a Pi as well. There's so many models now, it's hard to keep up, though.

Yeah. I'll probably stick to the lower end of the most recent models. I'm building a cluster just for study (spark and kubernetes) so no reason to pick models with 4gb or 8gb. Though one higher end may serve as the master. I have not decided yet.

If you go to 8gb you have to shift to a 64bit operating system right? And isn’t there a memory efficiency cost of shifting to 64bit? Intuitively it would make sense if things were not 64bit optimized but still had to allocate 64bit chunks you’d be incurring some amount of unnecessary memory bloat.

I don’t have this info ready in my head but I think I’ve seen analysis of it previously.

The thing is I don't know what I'm going to do with my cluster...I'll probably just practice K8S on top of it. On the other side I can still install 64bit on the 2GB/4GB variation right? Just hope I didn't get the wrong pic :/

Even the new Pi Zero 2 W is not bad to begin with.

The pi 4 is awesome. I use it as a WireGuard server and a bench computer. I use the zero w as a pihole.

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