[tptacek]

There's no documented karma input to ranking and I doubt any exists. Stories I submit are picked up as randomly as anyone else's.

The same isn't true of stories I write; I have a pretty good track record of getting blog posts on the front page. But HN doesn't know when something I've submitted is something I've written; what gets stories from high-karma users ranked is mostly just name recognition.

I doubt people are looking at the submitter name when choosing to upvote stories; I do think some subset of them look at the domain name of the story site though.

[j1elo]

I have never checked out how much karma anyone has in here, but after reading you I went on to have a look. First time I look at this, and it turns out you have "331331". That was a strange enough number that for a split second made me think I was looking at some random description field and you had put some magic number you like (a la 1337 or the likes)