[andrewmcwatters]

I’m curious what the distribution of karma is on HN, but I haven’t bothered to write a polite scraping method of reading through user’s profiles to grab counts that’s only a little more GET-y than just a human reading HN yet.

I’ve been curious about this for a long time though, already having pulled statistics like distributions of GitHub followers and stargazers.

[abetusk]

It's pretty old (3+ years) but I did some sophomoric analysis on some HN data [0]. I just added a frequency-karma plot and it looks power law, which should be no big surprise. Using a MLE from John Cook [1], the exponent looks to be about -1.1.

[0] https://abetusk.github.io/yahnda/

[1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/11/24/estimating-the-exp...

[andrewmcwatters]

Nice work! This is basically exactly what I was curious about. Thanks for satisfying my itch. Kudos for the db snapshot, too!

[lucideer]

> a polite scraping method

Shouldn't be needed, there's an API.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

[andrewmcwatters]

Oh thank you, I always forget about this thing.

[snowwrestler]

Karma per account is a power law distribution. You can see the top 100 accounts here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Everyone else has less karma than these folks… the long tail.

I haven’t graphed it, but my subjective sense is that my karma per comment is distributed similarly. Most comments get approximately 1 karma point, but occasionally one comment will get dozens or even hundreds of upvotes.

[andrewmcwatters]

We’ll of course it’s a power law, but that doesn’t tell you anything about whether 5000 karma is the 20th or the 33th percentile.

[zimpenfish]

If I'm querying 'abetusk's SQLite data correctly, 5000 karma would be the 99.64th percentile.

    sqlite> select count(*), sum(karma > 5000), sum(karma <= 5000) from users;
    558905|2018|556887

2018 from 558905 is 0.36%. Using the stats extension from sqlean confirms it.

    sqlite> select percentile(0+karma, 99.64) from users;
    4952.0
    sqlite> select percentile(0+karma, 99.65) from users;
    5070.50800000003