It would be interesting to see karma-per-word, as well, as a kind of succinctness density factor. Although karma points are not equivalent to quality, and you’d need to also factor in average comment length and some other things.
To use myself:
31,273 karma / 351,012 words ≈ 0.0891 karma per word
The submission karma is public, so you should be able to subtract it, but that karma doesn’t seem to be the same as the one for comments (i.e. I think one point in a comment gives you one point overall, but on submissions you need two or three points to earn one in your account).
I'm less interested in the idea as a ranking, and more as a way to evaluate my own writing, with the aim of being as succinct but high quality as possible.
But at almost 90, I have to ask: do you have a blog I should follow?
I felt as if I had written quite a lot on HN and I was always referencing my past comments. I just usually write what I am thinking so I do have quite a filler words in my HN comments, but still, I wanted to see how many words have I written in the first place & I wrote this thought in another comment & thought that its pretty interesting, let's do it. Maybe others would be curious too :)
But essentially, some part of me wanted to write blog too to quickly reference it and be part of the indie-web.
This is something that I wrote in that comment
"I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.
Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)"
So you aren't alone in having the procastination around making a personal blog. This is literally why I had made this idea so if this project (or discussion) helps you in making a personal blog & helps atleast a single person (meaningfully). I would consider my project to be success :)
Have a nice day and good luck for your personal blog!
I definitely feel like I've written at least 50-100 decent blog posts as HN comments over the years.
And thanks!
A quirky feature of HN is that you can only see detailed karma counts for your own posts. One of these days I plan to scrape all of mine so I can sort by karma and do some meta-commentary.
Seems simple enough, while searching I came across this snippet you can paste in the console, and gives you a sorted list of most upvoted/downvoted comments: >>36107028
Sadly requires hitting news.ycombinator.com rather than the API, but only way to get the actual points as you mention.
You're assuming "high karma = high quality" which, isn't always correct :) I've had wildly incorrect claims be upvoted a lot, and correct ones downvoted, seems to be more about what the subject is about and what "side you're coming from" rather than anything else sometimes. Other times it goes exactly as expected.
End effect is, I wouldn't rely on karma as a signal for quality, just "agreement at large" or something.
> Although karma points are not equivalent to quality,
But I don't think they are totally uncorrelated to quality, either. So you'd need a way to factor karma points in without over-valuing them.
To really get specific, the only thing we're really measuring here is something like, well-written, succinct comments that are appreciated by HN users that are able to upvote. Which is not exactly super useful or insightful, but is a fun exercise.
I think writing well with plain language would be a better indicator of worthwhile contributions than estoeric jargon that only serves to confuse or intimate. That would be a lot more difficult to measure though, the number of fancy words per post probably is a lot easier to vibe code.
And I really need to waste less time here, didn’t expect to be top 1500…
Hot takes? Aside: an example of a "third rail" post (where I seem to get the most downvotes) appears to be when I disparage UBI. I used to get hated for disparaging self-driving cars too but people beat me up less about that these days.
A prominent example of a laconism involving Philip II of Macedon was reported by the historian Plutarch. After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, Philip turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe. The reply was "Neither."
Losing patience, he sent the message:
If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.[4] The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:
If.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase?utm_source=chat...
One of the things in future I wish to personally learn is how to write concisely. My posts are large and scattered.
To me, the beauty was in the depth/content in Hackernews. I still remember the day when HN clicked to me when I was in metro. A comment clicked with me and really changed my perspective on something. It was fairly long from what I can tell (I am sorry but I am a little hazy other than I was going/returning to school and I was using hackernews)
HN comments are great the way they are. Let's keep it that way.
> That would be a lot more difficult to measure though, the number of fancy words per post probably is a lot easier to vibe code.
Agreed, I use it for prototyping but I am still learning. I hope to not vibe code as I progress and go to college for example. Currently I was constrained because I was (sad?) from my last exam not going so well & the next one being in 8 days ish.
Wish me luck :)
The only reason I vibe code is either for prototyping (for time constraints) and I just wanted to share it to the world.
I have actually written a lot about it. I hope you can read it if you have time [all comments are and will always be written by me] :)
Have a nice day! I am just happy that it can be on front page :]
Especially on political threads you'll see the most milquetoast takes imaginable basically locked at the top of the page because they were commented 2 minutes after the post was made, and all the fighting happens underneath.
Here's the Query that I ran on play.clickhouse.com (Please note that both the queries that I am about to give are AI generated)
SELECT id, argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma FROM hackernews_changes_profiles GROUP BY id ORDER BY current_karma ASC LIMIT 5
№ id current_karma1 1 Proven -247
2 VentureHawk -89
3 adamyormark -50
4 oldpersonintx2 -45
5 sevenstar -35
So proven has the lowest karma.
While at it, Here's the query for the most upvoted (karma) people on hackernews
SELECT id, argMax(karma, update_time) AS current_karma FROM hackernews_changes_profiles GROUP BY id ORDER BY current_karma DESC LIMIT 5
id current_karma 1 tptacek 414947
2 jacquesm 235042
3 ingve 214146
4 todsacerdoti 204814
5 rbanffy 184030
I remember tptacek because he is the second person of all the people (behind dragonwriter) and he has written 14.37 Volumes worth of game of thrones.
Hope this helps. I just ran the query because I was curious to find the results :D
I can add this query to the website, but one of my worries (even with this post) is that people might try to now benchmark it which wasn't my intention & it will fail to be a good measure (someone mentioned the goodhart's law which is correct/apt here)
A lot of people have given me some really great ideas. Commenting to have them in backlog whenever I get bored and think to add addition. I would just be interested in having a dump/export of my comments personally as well (someone else wanted to/analyze all of their comments and have them in a floppy disk, maybe this can help their idea too!)
I aim to avoid it these days, with varying degrees of success. I don't need fictitious internet points, I want to hear other people's genuine thoughts on a subject of interest. Or sometimes just to share something I thought was neat.
But since all social media are Pavlovian conditioning for points, you rarely get any fruitful exchange. And it seems to be getting rarer and rarer, sadly.
I wonder how one would structure social media to avoid it. HN is good, but the karma system is a double edged sword. Would it increase the quality of the discussion to retain the use of points for ranking posts, but hide point counts completely? Perhaps they could be represented by words: "Positive response", "negative response", but only past -3 and +3, with no changes in wording beyond that score?
I do think that pithy is good. The real world also rewards people who can convey an idea succinctly. ("Healthcare for all" for example is an effective rallying cry despite lack of implementation details.)
somehow almost close to the top 10k despite writing one-hundredth as much as the top guys.
Politics is not assessed in terms of how the slogans sound, but what they achieve. Universal healthcare is further away today than it was in the '90s, and Democrats are less 'rallied' than ever.