So the problem is that the karma count in the API is not updated if a user has not submitted anything recently? So a comment from 2 days ago that is still gett

So the problem is that the karma count in the API is not updated if a user has not submitted anything recently? So a comment from 2 days ago that is still getting upvoted would not update. You could scrape user profiles at a rate of 2 per minute and still respect robots.txt (https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt). But to scrape more and be a good citizen, use the API with limitations, or some combination of the two (e.g. if you have a list of 1000 users, use the API first, and for users who may not have posted in the last 48 hours, scrape them directly). You could also try contacting YC staff and asking for permission to scrape at a higher rate.