HN Explorer

A sure way to become a HN power user . . .

5 points by aresant ↗ HN
I'm as guilty of this as anybody - but if you'd like to gain a massive amount of Karma simply write a script that posts every single new up-trending article from:

a) Daring Fireball

b) TechCrunch

c) NYTimes

Not that this is a big deal, I just find it interesting - what better way would there be to handle these submissions?

10 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 21.2 ms ] thread
brk
You forgot to add PG's essay's to the list. Those seem to be karma gold for whomever submits them.
raffi
What does Karma really matter for? The only way to see it is to look at someones profile. I can't imagine the leaderboard is that big of a deal except to the person on it. And even then, I can imagine that it's not that big of a deal to those people.

If someone wants to become a HN power user, the key seems to be participation. Participate and people learn your handle, people learn your views and story, and sometimes you get to connect with similar people in real life. It's kind of neat.

jacquesm
Simply not count them. That way it is no longer a race between 'who submits them first' (you know who you are ;)) so all the hangers on add their upvote.

That's how this works. I suspect quite a few people have those sites in their rss feeds and as soon as they spot one they post it hoping to beat the rest to the game.

It's the HN equivalent of /.'s 'first post' meme.

Only here the 'first poster' gets rewarded with karma so they keep doing it.

Let me complete your list for you:

(left column is total credits for articles submitted from that source):

  +--------+------------------------------------+-------------+---------------------+                                                                                         
  | sumpts | domain                             | submissions | pointspersubmission |                                                                                         
  +--------+------------------------------------+-------------+---------------------+                                                                                         
                                                                                        
  |  40209 | techcrunch.com                     |        4788 |              8.3979 |                                                                                         
  |  26922 | nytimes.com                        |        3407 |              7.9020 |                                                                                         
  |   8994 | wired.com                          |         967 |              9.3009 |                                                                                         
  |   8298 | paulgraham.com                     |         149 |             55.6913 |                                                                                         
  |   7652 | readwriteweb.com                   |        1576 |              4.8553 |                                                                                         
  |   7605 | 37signals.com                      |         493 |             15.4260 |                                                                                         
  |   7001 | arstechnica.com                    |        1104 |              6.3415 |                                                                                         
  |   6746 | online.wsj.com                     |         816 |              8.2672 |                                                                                         
  |   6127 | economist.com                      |         766 |              7.9987 |                                                                                         
  |   5988 | news.bbc.co.uk                     |        1074 |              5.5754 |                                                                                         
  |   5660 | codinghorror.com                   |         334 |             16.9461 |                                                                                         
  |   4890 | venturebeat.com                    |        1045 |              4.6794 |                                                                                         
  |   4824 | code.google.com                    |         339 |             14.2301 |                                                                                         
  |   4758 | youtube.com                        |         976 |              4.8750 |                                                                                         
  |   4637 | ycombinator.com                    |          69 |             67.2029 |                                                                                         
  |   4364 | guardian.co.uk                     |         499 |              8.7455 |                                                                                         
  |   4082 | github.com                         |         244 |             16.7295 |                ...
aresant
Brilliant list.

Stunning that T/C is 2x their closest second, and hugely over the top 10.

jacquesm
Let me see if I can add average points per submission.

edit: I just made another version that shows the distribution for the users posting, but I'm not sure if I should post that.

It proves the OPs point in a pretty dramatic way though.

edit2: I've posted the list but anonymized: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076237

aresant
By the way, I'd encourage you to post that data as a seperate post as my original didn't seem to get much traction and I think it's an interesting topic that should be presented to the community and the data clarifies exactly why.
jasonlbaptiste
It probably will get you points. I rarely submit TC articles anymore, unless they seem worthy of being here/they just appeared in my RSS reader. Spend the time you would making a script (that will probably get banned + do more harm than good), and make smart comments. You'll meet some interesting people, get good feedback, and in the process get Karma.
bsd_junkie
Actually, blindly submitting ALL stories from those sources is not the smartest thing to do. Number one, you flood the system. Number two, there is no guarantee that new articles from those sources will necessarily do well. The more refined way to do this is to train a recommendation engine from an article aggregation system on some of the top articles that have been most liked on HN. Then, as the engine will collect and rank articles for you automatically and you can just use your script to take the article from the recommendation site and post them to HN. This way you have more assurance that your submissions will be liked on HN, and also the engine will likely find new article sources that you have never heard of before. I friend of mine is using this method to become a power user on Digg and Reddit. I think the uses several sites and has coded his own ranking system but the bulk of his recommendations come from www.euraeka.com, which is a news aggregator and recommendation engine. Basically he signs up for an account, finds out what the top articles on Digg are for lets say last year, then picks the top 25, searches them in Euraeka and then the engine starts finding articles that are like those. All he does afterwards is submit the recommendations on Digg. I think he does the same for Reddit. Anyways, Euraeka is just one of the engines out there. I am sure you can find others as well. The only question is which engine is spitting out the "best" recommendations. By "best" I mean which engine manages to most closely estimate the taste of the crowds on sites like HN, Digg, Reddit, etc.
TrevorJ
I think it need to be looked on less for the karma and more for the content.

Obviously, people find value in these submissions so the 'market' rewards those who post these articles. No more or less simple than that.