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mysterypie • yesterday at 9:21 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

There's something about the numbers I can't figure out. Look at the top three HN contributors by karma[1]:

      username    words       karma
  1.  tptacek     4,310,896   416351
  2.  jacquesm    3,841,209   237961
  3.  ingve       2,273       215283
How did ingve get to #3 with just 2 thousand words, whereas tptacek and jacquesm authored 3-4 million words? Looking at his 14-year history, it's true that he hasn't written that much. I suppose one possibility is that his writing is 1000x better at earning karma. But I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the quality of his 3-4 submissions per day that brings up his karma when one of his submissions is a hit (I think that submissions do count toward karma).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Replies

ChrisMarshallNY • yesterday at 10:46 AM

I think many folks get a majority of their karma from submissions (you can get a lot from popular stories). I believe that some people are quite good at anticipating which submissions will be productive (which is also something that LLMs should do well).

Most of mine is from comments. I’m too lazy to spend time, curating submissions.

sothatsit • yesterday at 9:27 AM

Could it be that ingve has submitted a lot of links, but has not made that many comments?

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Bengalilol • yesterday at 9:28 AM

Globally, karma comes from submissions and writing comments.

4 minutes later ...

    1. dragonwriter 4 785 959 words
    2. tptacek      4 310 896 words
    3. jacquesm     3 841 209 words
I don't know why you got ingve, their global rank is now 79469 / 774235
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