Ask HN: Total karmic wealth of all HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9385681

by humanarity • 11 years ago

15 17 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If you add up the karma of all user accounts what value do you get?

joshmn• 11 years ago

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.

S4M• 11 years ago

    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.

krapp• 11 years ago

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/

dang3• 11 years ago

32553783 and counting.

debacle• 11 years ago

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

There may be an error in my math.

networked2• 11 years ago

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.

brudgers• 11 years ago

How did you discount karma's future value?

shubhamjain• 11 years ago

Does it obey "power law" distribution? :)

dang3• 11 years ago

Yep.

humanarity3• 11 years ago

Does that include down votes ?

dang3• 11 years ago

It does. Downvotes lower the same karma score that upvotes add to.

networked2• 11 years ago

This means that the top 100 contributors (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders) plus PG (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg) account for only about 10% of the total karma (3222034 points as of the moment). I expected their part to be greater. I should say "sorry" to the average HN user for underestimating his impact. :-)

humanarity3• 11 years ago

Right and there's about 9 million items, so average is 4 points per item. I don't feel the average is very meaningful in this case. I'd also want to know, range, median and mode and a frequency histogram for the 100 largest, 100 frequent, and 100 rarest item scores.

humanarity3• 11 years ago

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

mrfusion2• 11 years ago

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?)

smeyer• 11 years ago

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.

mrfusion2• 11 years ago

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

Ask HN: Total karmic wealth of all HN?

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