Hacker News Karma Tracker

it lists total users as 11777 that looks like a very small number for hn which sends 10-20k visits if a site hits top spot. or are there a lot of lurkers who never signup?

This was interesting initially, when I just "ego-surfed" it when the link was first submitted, because of the richness of the data displayed. It became more interesting, as the discussion here in this thread developed, when I realized I could look up any arbitrarily chosen user, for example the user who kindly submitted this link, freework, to see the same rich data for that user.

The current user interface on Hacker News proper shows a leader board

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

and discloses total karma and recent comment karma average on each user's user profile, e.g.,

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult

But this interface offers more, and prompts me to look up some fellow users to see what their detailed statistics look like. As I expected, cwan, who gains almost all of his karma from submissions rather than comments, has a higher percentile than anyone else who began participating here in the same month.

AFTER EDIT: Link to an old discussion I tried to stir up, on a topic which other users are discussing in this thread, "Ask HN: What Kinds of Comments Should Be Upvoted?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084

I'm always interested in how to emphasize the positive by upvoting early and often when I see good stuff here, so I like to hear opinions from all of you about what is good stuff.

P.S. By following the links from the submitted site, I am reminded that patio11 and I seem to have the same join date. I'm honored to be behind him in any ranking that includes the both of us.

mtgx is first and second on http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars, too.

Since HN doesn't publish a userlist, this site gets its data by crawling the "latest posts" HNSearch API every ten minutes. That 11,000 users includes all users who have made a post on HN since January 25th. Thats right, 11,000 unique users have means post on Hacker News in the past 2 weeks.

I think you're missing an important metric: karma per submission. People with high KPS tend to be those who keep their mouths shut most of the time but when they do have something to say it's generally worth paying attention. I think this is the kind of behavior that really ought to be encouraged more than contributions per unit time.

Also, the see-your-data feature fails on Safari.