

Ask HN: Total karmic wealth of all HN? - humanarity

If you add up the karma of all user accounts what value do you get?
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dang
32553783 and counting.

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debacle
I converted that to USD and it came out to $0.00.

There may be an error in my math.

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networked
Karma isn't worth anything directly but on HN it is a fair proxy for comment
quality -- and quality HN comments have a monetary impact.

For one thing, quality comments take time and effort to write. Suppose a
comment takes 5 minutes per to write per karma point earned. Then 32553783
karma points are worth 32553783*5/60/24/30 ≈ 3767.8 man-months or
approximately 314 man-years not spent doing something else.

This isn't to say that HN comments just lose the authors (or their employers)
money due to opportunity cost. I would not be surprised if for a number of HN
users their commenting led to new clients and business partners, not to
mention exposure for their open source projects or simply memorable
discussions the impact of which is harder to estimate in monetary terms. (For
example, the recurrent discussions about Stoicism have made converts.)

Then some comments may not make the author money -- at least not as directly
as getting a new client -- but may be worth a lot in terms of the money they
make others; patio11's long comment history comes to mind.

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joshmn
Not an admin, so I can't speak to what they have available. But as a hacker...

Since the usernames are not queryable via an integer (e.g. user?id=1235654321)
it's not exactly the most trivial of things. You'd have to go through an
endless amount of posts, get every possible username from the comments, go
through all stories submitted, grab their usernames, and then loop through the
HN API and grab karma info.

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S4M

        select sum(karma) from user_data;
    

If the HN server uses an SQL database and has a table users containing the
user names and their karma - and they must have something like that since the
karmas are displayed on the profiles.

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krapp
Flat files and Lisp macros, with everything stored as closures in RAM, AFAIK.
HN doesn't use a relational database at all[0], unless they added one
recently.

[0] [http://arclanguage.org/](http://arclanguage.org/)

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mrfusion
I just noticed my profile had a section explaining average karma. But I don't
see where my average karma is shown. (Or is my main karma number actually the
average it's talking about?)

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smeyer
Do you use an extension or something with HN? I think I had such a description
from an extension I used, and the description persisted after HN decided to
stop showing average karma.

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mrfusion
Yeah totes! Thanks for pointing that out. It's hnes. I guess its doing
something there.

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humanarity
Also I'm now wondering what's the total karmic wealth of reddit, stackexchange
and Facebook each?

