Why is there lag? How does the logic work? Is it lag or do you not earn points, sometimes? It's unclear, but it could be a downvote scenario - but I didn't see my karma points go up or down as points for the article changes.
There is a 'roughly' in the guidelines. What does that mean?
ref - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I've had zero extra karma from a well-written and thought-out post, and I've had tens of extra karma points from what I considered a 'throw-away line'.
And what do I get from all that karma? Zero, zilch, nada, nuttin'.
Don't waste your time chasing it. Or if you do, don't complain about it.
Not all upvotes are considered equal. There is logic in the system to prevent voting rings. If people are suspected of having a groups of friends and they all upvote each others' submissions indiscriminately, then the votes aren't counted against the people, but are still counted for the article.
There's more to it, and I don't know all the details, but in short, you don't always get votes credited to you, hence the "roughly" in the FAQ.
You can email the mods and ask for more details, but the algorithms are not completely open, not least because they discourage really caring about karma. It's rough and ready and good enough to help rank items and comments.
I think it doesn't look like a voting ring problem. (I don't have internal information, It's only a gut feeling looking at the pattern of submissions of the user, the site and the Moon phase.) I'd expect a 50% increase of points, something like 2 or 3 in this case.
If you want an official reply, write to the mods hn@ycombinator.com
In the guidelines, 'roughly' means something like
fake quotes> the difference is part of the secret sauce (for example to prevent spam) and we tweak it constantly (so it's difficult to explain)