Hacker News Reader

Comment by bm98 | Hacker News Reader

OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1944871

View on HN

It's limited by time and other factors. If you haven't commented on anything for a considerable time then there aren't enough values to average.

I think it works like this: Take the last N values from the last T time, discard the largest (and perhaps the smallest) and compute the average of what's left. If there aren't enough, don't bother.

For more details, read the code. It's available here somewhere ...

From the last release of news.arc (which may have been a while ago but should be somewhat close to what news.yc is running):

    ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.  
    ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc#L2301

I don't have any submission either, so the presence of an average score shouldn't be affected by that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com