PG: feature request - how about a way on news.yc for me to give points out of my karma to a submission/comment that I particularly like? Right now, upvotes are free so I can just throw them around. If they came out of my karma, maybe they'd be more valuable and presumably lead to better voting?
I was about to skip the article because all the comments were about YC karma.
Lots of people have also wanted to be able to give more than one upvote every now and then, say 5 extra upvotes in a day. Your idea may solve that elegantly as well. You can give as many as you want, but they come out of your karma.
The real challenge is to avoid complicating the UI.
But if you want to do something special one way to do it is to pay for it in karma points. And yeah, that could be +n or -n.