

Ask PG: Please publish frequency data for karma-points - eru

I would like to do some statistical analysis on the distribution of karma-points.  I was just about to write a script to get the required data from the site.  But then I did not want to mess with it.<p>Could you please publish how many items got which score?  I have some hypothesis I would like to test.<p>Thank you!
======
babul
There are other sites that index YC for search purposes etc., so if you are
doing something that will index this site to parse threads and scores I'm sure
you will be OK.

------
pg
Can you tell me precisely what question you want the answer to?

~~~
eru
Yes.

I want to see if giving an item upvotes makes it more likely that it gets more
upvotes still.

I hope to be able to distinguish statistically between the influence of
inherent quality and current upvotes.

My arm-chair hypothesis is that prevalence of inherent quality leads to a
geometric distribution. And prevalence of attention grabbing effects should
make the distribution look more like a power-law.

If that simple histogram turns out to be inconclusive extending the analysis
from the final scores of items to their value over time might help.

P.S. A simple observation started me on this line of thought: I had the
feeling that upvoting comments close to mine makes it more likely that mine
will be upvoted. I wonder whether such strategic voting really makes a
difference.

~~~
pg
How about this: can you tell me precisely what statistic you want?

~~~
eru
Yes.

For each n, please state how many comments got exactly n points.

Is this precisely enough?

------
xirium
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185512> may be useful for your purposes.

~~~
eru
Thank you for that pointer. Though it's not quite what I want to analyze.

Perhaps I'll just have to write my own toy-parser then.

