Just proves points are bs.

See also: http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall

It used to be a main header link a couple of years ago but I think pg was trying to dissuade people from gaming it. I must admit I used to comment and post a lot more here when it was prominent but I'm a high score freak at the best of times :-)

Points are a pretty bad approximation of 'value' though. My shortest and most mundane comments are always the ones that get the most upvotes, meanwhile my lengthier ones that actually lead to insightful discussions hardly get any. And I've seen that same complaint around here from other users for a while now. The only real 'solution' I could think of would be to use slashdot's odd voting system, but meh...

Execute this in the page's scope. Works on Chrome at least.

    (function(){
      var table = document.querySelector("table tbody tr+tr+tr td table tbody");
      [].slice.call(table.querySelectorAll("tr")).map(function(r){var c=r.querySelector("td:last-child");return [c?parseFloat(c.innerHTML):0,r]}).sort(function(a,b){return b[0]-a[0]}).forEach(function(r){table.appendChild(r[1])});
    }());

Well put.

I agree with almost everything you are saying but would like to point out that in my observation on HN some community members (by your definition of "community") are more equal than others. And what they say, think and perhaps up vote or flag means quite a bit.

Noting last paragraph of this top 10 profile:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm

I think you have misunderstood what what I was trying to say. I was explaining why posts like this with seemingly little information density, redundant "congratulations" comments and low relevance to probably majority of HN users pops up at top. Yes, I've found raganwald's articles and comments insightful more than one occasions. However I've little interest in what color of pajama he wears in night or what flavor of ice-cream he likes. That's what Facebook is for. And there is a reason I haven't checked my Facebook "frontpage" in month. I think of HN as community of like-minded people who likes to share relevant insightful information. I do not have any judgement on what this "like-minded" means or what "relevant insightful information" should include. If some community member in leaderboard started having secret extra marital affair, should it be on frontpage of HN? I think it should be left to community to decide. What I was trying to say is that lack of downvote button disables community to make this decision. When you have only upvote button, a small group of people can collude (knowingly or unknowingly) to push anything at the top very easily whether it reflects the general sentiment in community or not. I'm still not proposing HN should starting having downvote button. As a machine learning guy, I'm endlessly fascinated with collaborative filtering and this is interesting case for me how lack of downvote/dislike/negative ratings impacts relevance.

How is that insulting? It's the reason that he's high on the leaderboard and the reason that he is recognised by the community. I'm just stating the truth here - he is unusually smart.

Edit: It has to be pointed out that I was responding to a comment which said "Why on earth is this interesting enough for the greater HN community to care about?" which was in fact a rude thing to say.

There is a way indeed. Just click on the "link" link within the comment's header. On the standalone comment page there will be a "flag" option within the comment header. There may be a karma limit or something though; I'm not sure about that.