Ask HN: quickest way to earn some hacker news points? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: quickest way to earn some hacker news points?

7 pointssi212 comments

Roughly twice as many points come from comments as stories

    > (with (s 0 c 0) 
        (for n (- maxid* 10000) maxid* 
          (let i (item n) 
            (if (astory i)   (++ s (realscore i)) 
                (acomment i) (++ c (realscore i))))) 
        (list s c)) 
    (14501 28488)

so the way to get lots of karma would seem to be to post good comments. But that assumes comments and stories take equal work, which may not be true.

Why do you need to get karma fast, though?

It would be great if there were a karma market:-) Having accumulated a bit of the stuff, it's evident that it's entirely useless outside of comment threads, where it indicates popular comments.

Not only do comments and stories probably not take equal work, but there are unequal numbers of stories and comments.

This is an issue because the goal is to maximize karma per unit of effort, so the question is how does the expected_karma_per_submission to expected_karma_per_comment ratio compare to the work_per_submission to work_per_comment ratio.

Finally, submissions are assymetric in the sense that they can only be voted up. This is hard to capture in the above ratios. Submit some mindless articles and you will collect no karma on most - but you will get a few points here and there, and in aggregate your karma will increase. Submit a similar number of mindless comments and you'll net lose a bunch of karma.

Why? I never look at other people's karma anyway. Really it's a silly concept because it can only, really, go UP (except in odd cases) and there is no easy way to judge 2 people next to each other (because they will have joined at different times and commented in different places).

And besides 68 Karma does not make you (for me at least) any less "important" than those with thousands of Karma...

(of course, this topic does put me off slightly)

Forget the Karma - get involved in the sub-culture and you will gain respect.

1) Create an irrelevant post asking how to get karma.

Be the first to post a new pg essay :)

Post an article about xyz company rumored to be in late-stage talks to acquire Twitter.

Say smart things and find interesting things.

Flame PHP.

contribute relevant information and/or clearly labeled opinion.

Submit an interesting page on Erlang.

Or reply to comments with more links to Erlang.

http://www.reddit.com/r/erlang

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