
Ask NickB:  How do you do it, dude? - iamelgringo
You're all over the place.  Your current karma is over 8000.  How much time do you spend submitting links, etc...?  Any tips or tricks?<p>By the way, thanks for the hard work in making the site better.
======
edw519
Can you downmod a submission? I don't see how. If not, then submitting is a
good strategy to get karma. You can't lose any.

Engaging in a debate, OTOH, is another issue. Doesn't matter who's right, what
you've done, or what you know. If someone else disagrees with you and doesn't
feel like saying why, they just click the down arrow. "Anonymous Coward
Downmodders".

I could earn 50 points by posting the cure for cancer in one post and lose it
all by saying I hate <Ruby, Facebook, Lisp, whatever> everywhere else.

So, to be safe, keep submitting, don't insult anyone, and never say anything
controversial. But what fun would that be?

(Geez, I hope nobody disagrees with this.)

~~~
edu
What the heck? What happens if you lose some karma? If you want to insult
somebody (and it's related to the context), do it!

~~~
rms
Maybe you won't get to 250 points and will be stuck with orange as your top
color forever!

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nickb
Wow.. a thread about me? I guess I should feel honored :)

A word about myself so you can see where I'm coming from... I'm currently part
of a startup. We're working feverishly on a product that I feel might get some
heavy competition in 6-12 months. I've seen one or two products that sort of
come close to the area we're approaching but they haven't really hit the
bulls-eye. The pace at which we're working is not for the faint of heart and I
work about 12-13 hrs every day. The team has about 4 people so far (+2 part
time) and I'm the lead. This is my third startup (1st time as a lead) so I've
seen things from many different angles. I've experienced a startup that
skyrocketed and one that failed and also one that's doing moderately well. So
yes, I've seen what works and what doesn't. We're completely self funded at
this point (myself and my co-founder put some cash into the company) but we
might go out and raise some money 6 months from now or so. We have never
applied for YC... we're probably too late and too big for YC.

Now, after reading that description, you will understand what my interests are
and why I like this site so much. I'm primarily concerned with methods, ways,
advice of how to work using agile methods and how to develop webapps fast. We
use RoR, some Java, some Python, some Flash and a lot of JavaScript.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of functional languages (Lisp & Erlang) so you will
see a lot of submissions from me on those topics as well. I am also
_extremely_ interested in various distribution methods (viral, word of mouth,
SEO/SEM) so you will see me submit a lot of links like that.

Now, how exactly do I track news. Well, I use an RSS reader (NetNewsWire, grab
it, it's free now) to gather my news and the only news website that I actually
open inside a browser is Hacker News. I check RSS feeds about 3-4 times a day
(usually during breaks and when I need to clear my head) and I use a YCN
bookmarklet to submit (<http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html>). It
literally takes a second to submit using that handy little piece of JS code. I
track about 150 feeds. Majority of them are about programming and technology.
But I also track a lot of marketing, business and startup-related legal blogs.
I dislike heavy volume blogs since they post a lot of fluff and a lot of it is
boring to me at this point. So, whenever I find something that's interesting
to me, I post it here. Over the past six months, I found a lot of interesting
blogs linked here so I doubt you're missing much if you just track HN's "new"
section.

Submissions that are not strictly news are usually best links on the topic
that I was researching. For example, after I did some research on
recommendation systems, I posted a few links that were helpful to myself. I
also use HN as a crude delicious.

I also enjoy commenting on HN because people who frequent this site tend to be
smarter than people on other sites and they tend to be in the same situation
as myself: fighting time and working on something and looking for ways to make
their product successful and better. Signal to noise ratio (SNR) on HN is also
quite high. I was afraid that it would fall after pg rebranded and expanded
the focus of the site but that has not happened yet (lucky for us!)

I like to read a lot and I read very quickly so you'd be surprised how little
time I actually spend reading stuff on the web. I try to read a book a week as
well.

Quick tip... check out the "new" section and give a mod point to articles you
like. Most of the articles get "hot" after they reach the front page but a lot
of quality articles never reach it. When you've identified people who have
similar interests as yourself, keep track of their submissions. I keep track
of submissions of 3 people here and I upmod their stories quite often since
they interest me. For example, this is my submission queue:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nickb>

And finally, reward people who post to your threads by moding them up :). Has
this made any difference to my rep? Probably not but I like spreading karma.

PS: My HN specific email's in my profile. Feel free to ask personal questions
offline.

~~~
danw
Nice one nickb. Have you also tried tumblr as a 'crude delicious'? It has a
sweet bookmarklet thats easy to use the same time as news.yc's.

Two tips I'd like to chip in myself:

1) Rewrite the headline to make it clearer

2) Don't post a submission or comment unless you believe it creates value for
others. Consider the signal/noise ratio.

And a third for those who only want karma:

3) Mention a keyword such as PG, YC or Lisp in the headline. "Justin.tv Video
interview with Paul Graham on writing openID support for news.yc in lisp"
would be a high karma headline

~~~
kyro
...I was going to say something against that last point, and it not being done
for the right purposes. I then hit reply and found you changed it. Well
played.

But, this still applies to some more of the posts here. I notice that, for the
most part, people are harking against news.yc being flooded with crappy
submissions and turning into digg/reddit. Then you have threads like this
where a portion of the focus of these comments are geared towards giving tips
on how to have high karma retrieving posts.

In my opinion, karma is nice and all, but the main purpose of news.yc is to
submit quality articles, articles that interest you and may interest others,
without karma valuation playing a role in submitting something. That is part
of the reason why digg has devolved into what it is now. People began to put a
great deal of emphasis and importance on accumulating diggs, or karma here,
which in turn decreased value of posts, and so on, blah blah.

In any case, vote me up!

~~~
danw
Sorry about it changing. I have a very iterative approach to writing.

Are there any non-karma approaches to news sites that work well?

The two that I know of are:

    
    
      1) Charge for membership
      2) Keep the community small

~~~
kyro
I'm not suggesting we eradicate karma. Karma is a fine way to credit quality
submissions and comments. Karma is not the problem, but rather a person's
desire to accumulate lots of karma is.

I'm putting the burden on the users to evaluate their motives and to make sure
that what they are submitting will really contribute to the community, not for
the sole purpose of fueling their karma fetish.

------
jsmcgd
I thought of posting a similar question before because you seemed to be
responsible for 1 in 6 of everything that happens on the site. I'm surprised
to hear you actually get other stuff done. For a while I was starting to
suspect you might be a professional Hacker News researcher!

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kirubakaran
Yeah seriously!

I recently got into the leader board which gave me a good feeling, although I
know I shouldn't be feeling that. But even with my low score, I feel like I am
Karma Slutting sometimes (I prefer that to the term Karma Whoring).

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brk
NickB is not real, he is my bot

(just kidding)

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cperciva
FWIW, in the past 5 days, nickb has gained 150 points of karma from
submissions, and 25 points of karma from comments; so clearly it's primarily
the submissions which are putting him so far "ahead of the pack".

Interestingly, in the same 5 days, nickb has submitted 37 stories -- an
average of score of just over 5 points each -- which places ranks him highly
not only in volume of submissions but also in quality.

~~~
gibsonf1
Nickb clearly has some clever software working for him :)

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joeguilmette
it's all those xkcd submissions :X

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eVizitei
I guess the links must be the money-maker, they tend to get more points then
the comments.

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tx
Ever heard of custom burned RSS feeds and an alarm clock?

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mynameishere
Step 1: Attribute value to Karma

etc.

~~~
Prrometheus
When you come back as a walrus, you'll be sorry.

~~~
mynameishere
I'm going straight to hell.

