Those are nice stats, and I do think we can get some interesting characteristics about our community. I thought it is quite powerful to point to paul, palish, s

Those are nice stats, and I do think we can get some interesting characteristics about our community. I thought it is quite powerful to point to paul, palish, sharpshoot, or pg, and say that they are the community, since they have the best points per post measure. They are nothing less than the best representatives of our community (with regards to posts, not comments). I'd like to think that the factors you mentioned (traffic, time of the day, controversy of the post) iron out statistically (since all posts are affected by those, there is an argument to ignore their respective influence). This initiative makes me wish it is only the beginning: I want some more stats! For example: - It would be interesting to see what's the points per post (PPP) of the leaders, compared to the PPP for most of the others (I agree with you that in the dataset, the leader to user ratio is too high). Maybe one could have a plotted distribution of PPP's across all users. - I know HN has 8000 uniques/day, what is the proportion of those that are posting? e.g. how many of those users with less than 5 posts? - also interesting is the proportion of points between posts and comments, per user. Different profiles: some people discuss a lot, some people post a lot, as it was often repeated in discussions. But what's the proportion of those 2 groups?