[mjn]

This is sort of interesting to look at, but not too reliable: it only shows users whose profiles happen to be swapped in to the in-memory Arc data structures whenever the list is regenerated. So from day to day, depending on post and caching and HN restart activity, different people are included or omitted. For example, at the moment raganwald isn't on the leaderboard, even though he has >40k karma, presumably because he hasn't posted in a bit, so his profile is swapped out of memory. I filed a bug about that but it got a WONTFIX [1].

I ran into that while putting together a profile of prolific HN posters [2]. I put it together a bit at a time over several days, and noticed that people were appearing and disappearing from the list, which seemed odd. I ended up finding a third-party list on Heroku that was more stable day-to-day [3]. However it seems not to be updating any more– the numbers are now a few months old.

[1] https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/49

[2] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html

[3] http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/overall