Ask PG: What is the running-total (summation) of all our Karma as users of HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: What is the running-total (summation) of all our Karma as users of HN?

23 pointsmlLK21 comments

I had to ask.

    > (sum [karma _] (users)) 
    1632636

This may be a slight undercount, because users are lazily loaded. But most with significant karma would be loaded at this point.

So the user with the highest karma has ~2.6% of the total... interesting.

That is assuming pg is included in the count. I haven't looked at the code so I'm not sure if pg is classified as a user or something else.

Some time ago I had a hunch that karma followed a powerlaw, so I mapped the leaderboard out in excel - and sure enough it looked exactly like a powerlaw graph.

The curve I fit to the leader board is,

  karma = 25343 * rank^(-.465)

Which has an R-squared value of 0.9791.

Unfortunately, this isn't a good enough fit to meaningfully extrapolate very far.

27075/1632636 = 1.65%. Am I missing something?

yes: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

Ah...

It would be a slight undercount if karma didn't follow a power-law. How many users are there again? How many were loaded when you ran that?

13527 of 43817 accounts are currently loaded.

What do you mean loaded? You mean in order to filter spam, trolls, or bots?

Users and items (stories, comments) are lazily loaded from disk to make restarts faster.

I did a few quick calculations, most of which were uninteresting. The only thing that's remotely notable is:

0.07% of the users (the top 100) account for 34.7% of the karma.

Numbers in easily consumable python form:

http://tire.less.ly/hacking/junk/karma.py

Slightly off-topic, but it's awesome that you post code along with the answer when asked these types of questions.

Now that the question has been asked, mean and median would be interesting. (And histograms and... :-)

What about a page that shows some neato statistics? It could be updated only once every day to keep the site fast (i.e., no real time stats).

Slightly related question: Is it possible to separate the karma from comments from karma earned from posts? I'd imagine most users earn their karma from one or the other and rarely both.

Average Karma per utterance would also be interesting. Or, indeed, per word.

I think Karma is a deceptive number. A high value for total karma of a site could just as easily indicate a dilution of value as an increase in value. Averages per user, per comment, per word, and per minute online would probably be more meaningful.

http://searchyc.com/user/**** (replace stars with username).

That'll give you # of comments, # of submissions, average # of points per comment, and average # of points per submission.

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