Top all-time · #4030
Austin's Nerdy Things
Personal blog · austinsnerdythings.comsystemshardware
Austin's Nerdy Things is a personal blog at austinsnerdythings.com about systems and hardware. Since 2022, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “Microsecond Accurate NTP with a Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for hands-on timekeeping projects, such as GPS-disciplined NTP and PTP time servers on a Raspberry Pi, plus an X-Plane autopilot post and a UUIDv7 deployment write-up.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Nerding out, one post at a time
Most-linked posts?
- Microsecond Accurate NTP with a Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-12-30
- From Ms to 26 Ns: How a $20 eBay SFP Module Beat My NTP Setup3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-04-27
- Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-24
- ZFS Slog Performance Testing of SSDs Including Intel P4800X to Samsung 850 Evo2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-02-01
- Millisecond Accurate Chrony NTP with a USB GPS for $12 USD2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-07
- /2025/02/18/nanosecond-accurate-ptp-server-grandmaster-and-client-tutorial-for-raspberry-pi/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-29
What Hacker News says?
There's even a pretty great autopilot for x-plane post that makes it to HN every now and then! https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/10/15/creating-an-autopi...
Comment linking /2021/10/15/creating-an-autopilot-in-x-plane-using-python-part-1/
on “Flying planes in Microsoft Flight Simulator with a JavaScript autopilot (2023)”Submitted Most Stable Raspberry Pi? Better NTP with Thermal Management as a story · 293 points
HN discussionAnd I wrote one in Python to climb/turn as well! And to navigate to any of the built-in X-Plane navaids - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2024/04/06/adding-track-follo... and the first post in the series - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/10/15/creating-an-autopi...
Comment linking /2021/10/15/creating-an-autopilot-in-x-plane-using-python-part-1/
on “How X-Plane Works”Submitted Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python as a story · 163 points
HN discussionSigh Yep. Dunning-Kruger effect specimens hammer out puff pieces to get their participation awards. Meanwhile, here's some other articles: NTP: https://austinsnerdythings.com/2025/02/14/revisiting-microse... PTP: https://austinsnerdythings.com/2025/02/18/nanosecond-accurat... https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/diy-ptp-grandmaster-c...
Comment linking /2025/02/18/nanosecond-accurate-ptp-server-grandmaster-and-client-tutorial-for-raspberry-pi/
on “The Limits of NTP Accuracy on Linux”Submitted $20 eBay SFP Module Outperforms My NTP Setup: From Milliseconds to 26 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAustin from Austin's Nerdy Things here - super stoked to see my blog's traffic at 7x the daily average at 7am! Thanks to all the visitors! I actually revisited this series a few weeks ago. I added a Flask/html frontend to control the autopilot setpoints (much easier/fluid than editing the code and restarting) using Redis as a quick intermediate "database" to store the setpoints. I whipped up a post this morning demo…
Comment linking /2024/03/24/adding-some-polish-to-the-x-plane-python-autopilot-with-flask-redis-and-websockets/
on “Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python”Submitted From Ms to 26 Ns: How a $20 eBay SFP Module Beat My NTP Setup as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAustin from austinsnerdythings.com here - thanks for the shoutout! Four years later these posts continue to be some of the top posts people read on my blog. Top hits from the past 30 days - * 3441 hits - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/19/microsecond-accura... * 2415 hits - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/09/01/how-to-deploy-vms-... * 1990 hits - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/08/30/how-to-create-a-p…
Comment linking /2025/02/14/revisiting-microsecond-accurate-ntp-for-raspberry-pi-with-gps-pps-in-2025/
on “DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi”Submitted Microsecond Accurate NTP with a Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAustin of austinsnerdythings.com here - that article does use PPS but there is a different writeup that does use USB that I refer to as my "millisecond accurate" guide - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/09/29/millisecond-accura...
Comment linking /2021/09/29/millisecond-accurate-chrony-ntp-with-a-usb-gps-for-12-usd/
on “DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi”Submitted Millisecond Accurate Chrony NTP with a USB GPS for $12 USD as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhave a look at this write up: https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/19/microsecond-accura... (not usb though -- uses pps)
Comment linking /2021/04/19/microsecond-accurate-ntp-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-pps-gps/
on “DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi”Submitted I sent Claude Opus 5 '–-' and it wrote me 5k tokens about a cartographer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you're looking to setup a GPS-disciplined time-server at home, I highly recommend this writeup: https://austinsnerdythings.com/2025/02/14/revisiting-microse... In the author's latest post he also sets up a pi as PTP grandmaster: https://austinsnerdythings.com/2025/02/18/nanosecond-accurat...
Comment linking /2025/02/18/nanosecond-accurate-ptp-server-grandmaster-and-client-tutorial-for-raspberry-pi/
on “DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi”Submitted Building DIMMsum: a price tracker for used server RAM on eBay as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote a super basic 2 axis "autopilot" with Python for X-Plane. The concepts are super simple. Getting the controller tuned properly is not. For a surprisingly large number cases, setting a P value in the 1-3 range and a I value as P/10 works extremely well. I now write Python for my day job. This code was written before that and now that I look at it, it is quite ugly: https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/10/19/co…
Comment linking /2021/12/06/coding-a-pitch-roll-altitude-autopilot-in-x-plane-with-python/
on “PID Controllers in Unity3D (2021)”Submitted I swept all 667 layer duplication configs for Qwen3-4B on 1x RTX 3090 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI did a ZFS SLOG benchmark last year and the author's conclusion what drive it is (HGST SS300) was one of the test subjects - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2023/01/31/zfs-slog-performan... That said, the model numbers don't really match up - which is explored a bit in the original post. Don't think a 200GB drive exists in this lineup. Love HGST drives. Also have a SSD400S 200GB that has 18 PB of endurance.
Comment linking /2023/01/31/zfs-slog-performance-testing-of-ssds-including-intel-p4800x-to-samsung-850-evo/
on “The formatting of Oracle-branded HGST SSDs (2021)”Submitted Microsecond Accurate Network Time Protocol Server with Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you have a Raspberry Pi laying around and want to run your own Stratum 1 NTP server - https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/19/microsecond-accura...
Comment linking /2021/04/19/microsecond-accurate-ntp-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-pps-gps/
on “Where does my computer get the time from?”Submitted ZFS Slog Performance Testing of SSDs Including Intel P4800X to Samsung 850 Evo as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think the most interesting thing on this page is the blog post at the bottom of how it was deployed on a VPS using docker compose ( https://austinsnerdythings.com/2023/11/01/using-github-actio... )
Comment linking /2023/11/01/using-github-actions-to-deploy-a-flask-nginx-cloudflared-tunnel-docker-compose-stack/
on “UUIDv7: The Time-Sortable Identifier for Modern Databases”Submitted From milliseconds to 26 nanoseconds: how a $20 eBay SFP module beat my NT as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt is certainly not to the same levels of accuracy as the capabilities provided by the board presented here, but I recently put together a stratum 1 NTP server (there are lots of various instructions online for setting up something like this [0][1]) on my LAN using a Raspberry Pi 4 and a GPS module with PPS output [2]. The setup took a bit of fiddling and experimentation to get working reasonably well (and it still…
Comment linking /2021/04/19/microsecond-accurate-ntp-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-pps-gps/
on “Time Card Mini Adds Pi, GPS, and OXCO to Your PC”Submitted One Layer, +12%: What 667 Configs Reveal About Small LLM Anatomy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionyep and you also can get multiple updates per second per plane. I think it tops out at 8 or so which is entirely unnecessary for the radar-style app but you can count on an update between each "scan". https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/18/moving-my-ads-b-an... https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/03/09/receiving-aircraft...
Comment linking /2021/03/09/receiving-aircraft-ads-b-position-signals/
on “My Toddler Loves Planes, So I Built Her a Radar”Submitted Show HN: Trained YOLOX from scratch to avoid Ultralytics (aircraft detection) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI've got a small Raspberry Pi clone set up with a GSP module running chronyd[2], advertised via DHCP as mentioned by GP. Didn't take much time or effort. I also added a RTC module so it could hold reasonable time during power-loss but I haven't had a chance to verify that it works as expected. [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001623104119.html The 7M and M8N are both much better than the 6M, regardless get a…
Comment linking /2021/04/19/microsecond-accurate-ntp-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-pps-gps/
on “Encrypted DNS and NTP = Deadlock”Submitted Show HN: Trained YOLOX from scratch to avoid Ultralytics (iOS aircraft detect) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
