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

[mlLK]

I had to ask.

[pg]

    > (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.

[ph0rque → pg]

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

[mixmax → ph0rque]

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.

[Bluem00 → mixmax]

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.

[dbul → ph0rque]

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.

[ojbyrne → ph0rque]

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

[ph0rque → ojbyrne]

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

[ojbyrne → ph0rque]

Ah...

[jcapote → pg]

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

[dschoon → pg]

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?

[pg → dschoon]

13527 of 43817 accounts are currently loaded.

[dschoon → pg]

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

[mlLK → pg]

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

[pg → mlLK]

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

[russell]

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

[GeneralMaximus → russell]

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).

[Banzai10]

So my karma is very low, at least it's below the average :D

[quantumhobbit]

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.

[chris11 → quantumhobbit]

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.

[anigbrowl → quantumhobbit]

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

[stcredzero → anigbrowl]

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.