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Comment by nphase | Hacker News Reader

Your karma has to reach a certain threshold before you have the option of down-voting. I believe that number is 200.

Funnily enough, my karma recently crossed the 200 point threshold, but I didn't recall the down arrows appearing for comments. I just logged in to tell you all that there must be more to it, since I've got 200+ karma and no down arrows. But lo and behold, there they are. I'm not sure if those are actually new or if I simply never noticed them before. If the threshold is not 200, it must be close to that.

Yepp. And, by the way, the source of HN is open, everyone can read how it works =)

Though is the "secret sauce" relating to HN specific voting fraud detection, etc, open source too? As I don't "do Arc" I've never bothered to look but pg has mentioned a few "techniques" they have for detecting fraudulent voting and accounts, and I can't imagine that's part of the core code..?

> Though is the "secret sauce" relating to HN specific voting fraud detection, etc, open source too?

No, then it wouldn't be secret anymore.

Security by obscurity is not perfect but in this case having that knowledge out there would only benefit the spammers and the 'gamers'.

Link?

From http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ :

Is news.ycombinator.com open source ?

Yes it is, the code is written in a language layered on top of scheme called 'Arc', you can get the whole package here: http://arclanguage.org/ , the package includes a slight variation (the 'secret sauce' is missing) on the code running HN.

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