Hey Paul, just putting down a quick observation as why this could potentially penalise some users based on geography (That is if you have it so features are enabled/disabled based on your average karma instead of total)

One of the things I've noticed is that us on the other side of the world have trouble generating the same kind of karma that other's can generate which is really a function of being too late to discussions.

For example, east coast USA is often around 14 hours behind my timezone, so I typically get to conversations about 6-8 hours after they've started and when people are usually heading to bed.

Generally I find my comments down the bottom of threads with 1 or 2 karma.

However, if I post in the middle of the night (usually as I'm heading to bed) or really early in the morning (essentially as I get up) I am in the peak hours of HN, my comments on average do very well for Karma, simply because more people are available to read them and as such vote them up or down accordingly.

Just a thought - you might want to have thresholds based on a person's "prime time" instead of a predefined average.

Yeah, I know about this problem. I hope to cook up some kind of solution eventually.

ok cool - just highlighting it ;)

how about something like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467739

The weighted average of recent posts approach to karma sounds like a good idea. I imagine that might change my own posting behavior in a way that I hope is liked by all.

Have you thought about publishing a subset of HN's data so others can experiment with it?

There are a couple archives of all collected posts, though in quick searching I can't seem to find the right keywords. (Haven't had my tea yet though...)