6 more points to go!
*Thanks to everyone who voted this up. I can now confirm that this is indeed legit. On your settings page you can enter a six digit hexadecimal number that will change the color of the top bar. I'm going to try some of these out! http://www.somacon.com/cgi/colorchart.pl
I made a color map sorted on hues and lightness: http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/colors.png
200 karma – make polls (http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll).
250 karma – customize the top bar background color.
??? karma – flag posts and comments (on their individual page).
Recent karma-threshold schedule:
10 karma - Upvote comments.
51 karma - Downvote comments. Flag comments.It's 51, the same as downvote.
The top levels were awesome:
30 Stamps: Special Date #1 Dinner and dancing with Dave.
36 Stamps: Special Date #2. Dinner and dancing with either Jean, Mike, or Murray.
50 Stamps: Ass Brand. The Frühead gets the Früvous budgie-dog (Larry Boniface Clebdon) branded on their ass. This is administered by a member of the band.
(And yes, it's happened enough times that I know it isn't just someone voting the comment back up in the intervening period.)
It's part of karma-grump protection. One's downvotes do not count, unless he upvotes first and at least as many times. If you run across something you want to downvote, first find something else to upvote. If you want to rack up downvote ammo to spare, upvote often. For example, if you upvote 10 times in a row, you will have 10 downvotes available. After that, your downvotes will no longer count, unless and until you do more upvoting.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39301
I'm considering adding an additional layer of protection against grumps: to only allow users as many downvotes as they've made upvotes. That way each user's net contribution to the global karma would be at least neutral.
Alternatively, HN is keeping a backlog of my uncounted downvotes, and counting them in order as I make more upvotes. Thus, as long as there's a backlog, any new downvote I make will initially not count.
Personally, I think the >=0 net karma rule goes too far. I've tended to downvote more than I upvote because I drift towards policing behavior (not "grumpness": not all people who downvote more than they upvote can be classified as grumps, which is a highly subjective notion anyway), and generally have high standards for what I consider worthy of an upvote. Social moderation systems have to account for the variety of sociological roles. Not to mention, the net karma of the site may be negative, but a >=0 rule will never allow this state to be represented.
It is also impossible to determine what my net karma contribution is, and thus that the >=0 rule is even in effect. Net karma contribution should appear on a user's profile page, or at the top menu bar. I shouldn't be expected to track my karma contribution manually.
If you have downvoted a single user many times in a row, you might have triggered an anti-karma-bombing feature. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+karma+... I would email pg at this site to inquire, and be ready to apologize if an apology seemed called for. Good luck.
I'm in like...the top 250...I should be able to.
This should have been exposed from the submit link.
I believe this is a not so subtle way to discourage gratuitous use of polls. I, for one, think that having it be an invisible feature is a great win for human decency--the knowledge that it is there prevents people from "vote up if" posts, but having it hidden doesn't remind people constantly that they can run polls to their heart's content. Since polls are almost universally free of useful content, but people still love to create them, this is, perhaps, the best that can be done.
There was one a month ago
At 1000+ karma, you take off your helmet and guess what you're a chick. If you win three times in a row on impossible mode with perfect karma without getting shot once, using nothing but the annoying gun that takes forever, you take off your armor and guess what you're a hot chick. Then you can play the game again wearing a bikini.
At 2000+ karma, Paul Graham comes to your house, tells you the meaning of life, and makes you a sandwich. It is the best sandwich known to man. Only rich people can make this sandwich.
Nasty Little Problems
It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.
The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random. [3]
Rumor has it that at 20,000 karma you get to know nickb's true identity.
Deleted comment
I see someone corrected that post too