Most of your Hacker News karma comes from comment scores only you can see - NinjaHawk's Nest
←
Investigation<br>Most of your Hacker News karma comes from comment scores only you can see
I assumed an old site like Hacker News had to be keeping a hidden reputation score on me. It isn't. It stores five fields, and the only score among them, karma, turns out to be mostly built from comment votes the site never lets anyone see.
NinjaHawk<br>July 22, 2026
This started with a hunch. Every large platform grades you. Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, all of them keep some private reputation number for your account, and they run it through a model you never get to see. It decides who your posts reach. Nobody at those companies will show it to you.
Hacker News is the interesting case, because Hacker News is old. It has looked the same for close to twenty years. It is famously allergic to features. So I had two guesses, and I liked both of them. Either HN was too stubborn to build a hidden score at all, or it had built one so long ago, in such plain un-obfuscated code, that the number was probably just sitting there in the open where I could read it right off the wire.
So I went to find mine. I want to walk through what I found, because the answer was not what I expected, and the real finding is better than the one I went looking for.
There is no hidden score. There are five fields.
Hacker News has a public API. No key, no login, no rate-limit dance. You ask it about a username and it hands back a small blob of JSON. This is everything it knows about you at the account level:
id, your username.
created, the second you signed up.
karma, one integer.
about, your bio text.
submitted, a list of the ID of every post and comment you have ever made.
That is it. That is the whole record. I checked it against several accounts and the shape never changes. There is no trust, no score, no rank, no shadow field with a suggestive name. The only number on the account that grades you is karma, and karma is already printed next to your name for the whole internet to see.
So the conspiracy version is just wrong. HN is not hiding a reputation grade in the page. It never built one. The thing I assumed was buried in old code does not exist, because the old code is genuinely that simple.
I almost stopped there. Then I looked at what karma actually is, and the post turned into a different post.
Karma is a comment score wearing a submission score's clothes
Karma looks like one clean number. It is not. It is the running total of the votes on everything you have ever posted, stories and comments together, added up into a single integer. The site shows you the total. It never shows you the breakdown.
So I reconstructed the breakdown. There is a second public API, the search index, and it behaves differently for stories and comments in a way that turns out to be the whole point of this post. For a story it gives you the score. For a comment it gives you everything except the score. The points field is simply not there. It is stripped off.
That is not a bug in the index. It is HN's oldest rule, working as designed: your comment has a score, and you are the only person on Earth allowed to see it. Everyone else, including the search API, gets the comment with the number sanded off. It is meant to stop bandwagoning, where people pile votes onto whatever is already winning.
Which sets up the thing I actually want to show you. Story scores are public, so I can measure exactly how much of someone's karma came from submissions. Whatever is left over came from comments. I pulled fourteen of the most recognizable accounts on the site and did that subtraction. A slice of it looks like this:
AccountKarmaFrom commentsStory hit-rateDead on arrival
tptacek422,970~91%20.6%5.3%<br>jacquesm242,026~86%10.2%23.6%<br>pg157,316~70%20.5%4.3%<br>rayiner127,920~98%9.5%15.9%<br>patio11127,807~96%36.5%1.9%<br>edw51973,785~87%2.0%40.4%<br>dang41,569~44%17.5%44.7%<br>sama23,059~0%51.6%3.3%
The middle column is the finding. For most of these accounts, the great majority of their karma came from comments. The median across all fourteen was about eighty percent. For rayiner and jerf it was over ninety-eight. These are the people the site treats as high reputation, and they earned that reputation almost entirely through comments, and every single one of those comment scores is invisible. Not just hard to dig up, but genuinely gone, stripped off at the source before anyone else ever loads the page.
So the number Hacker News prints next to your name, the one public signal of your standing on the site, is a sum of thousands of numbers that nobody except you is allowed to see. The scoreboard is public. Every individual score on it is private. I did not expect the answer to my "where is the hidden score" question to be "it is smeared across the one number that was never hidden at all," but that is where it landed.
One honest caveat, because I would rather you trust the careful...