The comments section of HN is it's most valuable feature to me, and I wanted a way to jump into discussions when I noticed something I could contribute to.

I move between desktops and mobile, and wanted something completely standalone that I could use to easily navigate whatever I am using to the article, then I can hit back and read the comments, or start tapping away my own.

I noticed a lot of comments here wishing for a way to get started with electronics; while completing this project won't teach you about Ohm's law or circuitry, this is a very low-cost way to use software skills to jump straight into microcontroller programming. Give the guide a read and try it out!

This is really cool! Thanks for sharing. I've read a bit about these types of chips before, but ive never seen the one with the screen. Tempted to give this a try as a first foray into it.

I made a similar thing with an ESP32, but with an e-ink screen the other day, if you want something that runs on battery:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/

I like this user's approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=LinuxBender

>> I intentionally filter my karma. It is not visible to me.

I ignore karma, points, etc on all forums and websites; it's a needless dick shaking exercise. I'd rather people know me for my comments than what position I'm at on a ranking board.

I run a forum (like message board style) after an older one kicked it, one of the things I did was turn off displaying post count, because that ended up being a thing that people used to gamify the experience and measure each other up.

I wish this feature existed on HN. Most of my browsing is done on mobile and I can’t seem to find a way to get rid of that number.

I use the harmonic app on android, and I don't think the karma is visible unless you pull up your profile.

This as a life philosophy would work great too.

The gadget looks cool. Just wondering though, can you turn off the notification for karma changes? Imagine if someone's post gets to the #1 spot, then their karma would be changing rapidly.

Can it notify you when you reach a new milestone in karma? (1000 karma, 500 karma)

Yes, please this.

Over time I've come to sort of despise the karma system. Some low karma accounts are amazing, some high karma accounts are tools (imho), and I wish there was a way to remain logged in yet ignore karma, except for maybe one update per day max. It is often an unhelpful distraction to me, personally.

You can use the uBlock Origin "Block element" feature to hide the karma and post scores.

Makes sense. However, on mobile this is a trickier challenge.

Brave on mobile is tough to beat. "It just works."

relatedly i wonder if there's existing tooling for getting notifications/daily recaps of comments made by high karma accounts (or accounts you choose to follow) - always felt like this was a missing feature in HN

Although not exactly that, here's a telegram bot I made with a bunch of features related to notifications from HN: https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot

Maybe I'll add such notifications in the future

You can follow any user on HN with rss.

https://hnrss.github.io/

For real, I wish I could follow people and then their new posts would come up on my feed.

Thank you! Definitely; right now it only checks whether the latest karma does not equal the previous karma: https://github.com/jareklupinski/hackernews-badge/blob/main/...

Changing the condition for this branch, for example to

if ((previousKarma + 500) < userKarma || (previousKarma - 500) > userKarma) {

would make the notification go off when the karma has changed by at least 500. For high value accounts, the variables should probably be changed to 'long's as well... I enjoyed the light show tonight ;)

If this is so important why not just add a widget to your desktop next to the clock. Why create a whole new device? I like the fun nature of building kits like this though.

personally I full-screen between 3 apps on my work mac, as a way to devote that real-estate to only work-relevant stuff. if I added a hacker news widget to my work desktop, I would be too distracted and never get any work done :)

this way I can glance at the widget whenever I'm feeling a bit bored and open the page on my phone, then take a break away from my desk with the content in my hand

It's just an AVR microcontroller with some dead simple C code(technically C++ but there's no reason to use C++ features very much).

The easiest way to configure it would be to just change the code.

Despite you can tether WiFi from a phone, it drains a lot of battery: what about phone<->badge Bluetooth pairing to switch for example to another WiFi? That would be very cool to walk around on a neck during a conference

Yup, this is a bit of a battery hog... another person posted a similar project using epaper, this should be able to get you days of battery life https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/

I had no clue you could embed video into a GitHub readme, that's really cool

Thank you for the detailed instructions. Much appreciated.

Neat, thanks for the write-up! Have a buzz/notification ;)