Hacker News Karma Superstars

And social validation is not a bad thing; I mean, why would it be bad to feel better about yourself for knowing that others enjoy and appreciate what you did?

That leaves root level posting and polarizing comments. Neither in itself a bad thing, but I find them generally time sensitive. By the time I see and read a post, my sentiments have usually already been expressed, and adding what's essentially a duplicate post seems counterproductive for the community, no matter how productive it would be for my karma. :) Anything extra I would have added works well in a reply to the similar comment.

As for polarizing opinions, those come when they come. I'm not willing to manufacture any when they aren't my own. I see my online persona as an extension of me, not some mask I put on so I can adopt other characteristics. I would feel just as bad as if I had lied to someone in real life.

All that said, if I was more in the habit of having a few drinks before or while reading HN, I'm sure I would have reams of data to play with. ;)

Actually, that would be a fun experiment. Have two accounts. One used exclusively while sober, the other exclusively while slightly buzzed or more. Maybe multiple accounts for different drugs of choice, although increasing consumption just to provide roughly similar use times may yield negative consequences...

Yes, it's weird and I know I'm not interesting enough to have people know me by name. I've just had a few incidents where people have tracked through my comment history and brought up things from the past to defeat me in an argument, and I get a little gunshy.

"At the end of the 19th century, economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered that wealth among a population is not normally distributed. Rather, it seemed to have the form of a power law P(k) ∼ k−γ.

Figure 2a shows the distribution of wealth in 2011 among the richest people in the US in a log–log plot. The distribution is quite skewed and somewhat resembles a power law. It also illustrates that the richest man in the US, Bill Gates (rightmost data point), is about 30 times richer than the average of the next 400 fabulously rich Americans. It's natural to view such a skewed distribution of wealth as both unethical and unjust.

The difference between the normal distribution of length and the power-law distribution of wealth is precisely the skewness: If Bill Gates were a length, he would measure more than 300 miles from head to toe. How can the occurrence of that extraordinarily broad distribution be explained?

In the case of wealth, one can seek an explanation in terms of human economic actions and greed. That approach seems fine at first. But the same broad distribution was discovered early in the 20th century to represent town populations in a country (figure 2b). In the case of towns, population growth, commerce, and migration are among the factors likely to shape the distribution. Power-law distributions appear in other diverse settings and, as is the case with wealth and town size, have seemingly disparate causes.

Species among genera (figure 2c), which should have something to do with biological evolution.

Word frequency in a novel (figure 2d), which should have something to do with how you write a book or how the human language arose and developed.

Surnames in a country (figure 2e), which should have something to do with the country's society and history."

http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/points_of_view/jus...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/11/occupy-m...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_index

The first is an attempt at drawing a correlation. "When you observe fact-pattern X, you can expect that property Y obtains." It might be derisive, but it's not AdHom. He's not using an unrelated character assassination to discredit an argument. I concede that it smells a bit ad-hom-y, but only because he has a lot bad to say about the article (all of it supported, imo), and so it kind of builds up momentum. That's the article's fault, though, for being so wrong about so much (although the article is right that WP is a complex (social) system, not perfectly documented).

(A related mistake, which I don't think you're necessarily making, is that of thinking that anything that attacks credibility is AdHom. If you say "Bob is always wrong about biochemistry, so he's probably wrong about this claim about haemoglobin", that's not AdHom either.)

As for the second, your inference might have been reasonable (if uncharitable), except that he later explains exactly why he brought it up: the AfD process has to operate at scale, it's not expected to be infallible. Combined with his other points about how notability has to work, it's build-up for his paragraph that starts with "Anyone who can snark... betraying a deep ignorance ...".

And I think it's a pretty decent comment, overall, because it has a virtue I prize, of looking at a wrong-but-seductive view, and giving enough additional context to help readers form a better picture. Though of course the magnitude of the upvoting depends on name-recognition.