At 250 apparently you can change the color of the bar on the top.

6 more points to go!

*Thanks to everyone who voted this up. I can now confirm that this is indeed legit. On your settings page you can enter a six digit hexadecimal number that will change the color of the top bar. I'm going to try some of these out! http://www.somacon.com/cgi/colorchart.pl

http://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors

You've won everything you're going to get. Congratulations.

No, I believe there's a higher threshold yet to post polls.

How do you post polls?

I'm in like...the top 250...I should be able to.

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

Thanks! I wanted this so many times earlier. Never figured how to post a poll.

This should have been exposed from the submit link.

I would have imagined that there'd be more. For instance, I can't downmod overall topics, and that seems like a fairly straightforward thing to unlock for much higher karma levels.

I have downvote arrows on comments, but at some point they ceased to affect the score. Which is to say, I click on the downvote, and the points go down by one, but upon reloading the page, the score is the same as before.

(And yes, it's happened enough times that I know it isn't just someone voting the comment back up in the intervening period.)

Could the time to downvote have already passed? (i.e. you downvoted on a stale page)

I have downvote arrows on comments, but at some point they ceased to affect the score.

It's part of karma-grump protection. One's downvotes do not count, unless he upvotes first and at least as many times. If you run across something you want to downvote, first find something else to upvote. If you want to rack up downvote ammo to spare, upvote often. For example, if you upvote 10 times in a row, you will have 10 downvotes available. After that, your downvotes will no longer count, unless and until you do more upvoting.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39301

I'm considering adding an additional layer of protection against grumps: to only allow users as many downvotes as they've made upvotes. That way each user's net contribution to the global karma would be at least neutral.

Thanks for pointing this out. I suspect there may be something genuinely broken with my downvoting, though, because despite having only upvoted for a good while, my downvotes continue to not count.

Alternatively, HN is keeping a backlog of my uncounted downvotes, and counting them in order as I make more upvotes. Thus, as long as there's a backlog, any new downvote I make will initially not count.

Personally, I think the >=0 net karma rule goes too far. I've tended to downvote more than I upvote because I drift towards policing behavior (not "grumpness": not all people who downvote more than they upvote can be classified as grumps, which is a highly subjective notion anyway), and generally have high standards for what I consider worthy of an upvote. Social moderation systems have to account for the variety of sociological roles. Not to mention, the net karma of the site may be negative, but a >=0 rule will never allow this state to be represented.

It is also impossible to determine what my net karma contribution is, and thus that the >=0 rule is even in effect. Net karma contribution should appear on a user's profile page, or at the top menu bar. I shouldn't be expected to track my karma contribution manually.

My question would be: why the secrecy? HN worried that transparency about the processes of ratings & their "rewards" (which (plus + $5.00) will buy you a cappuccino) would lead to abuse of the system? I think openness system would allow for HN viewers to discuss the value of different site-karma processes -- enabling the site designers (and all of us) to benefit more from the community's collective genius and experience (on this issue the way it does on others).

It's simpler than you think. As moderately dangerous new features got added, I gave them karma thresholds to avoid abuse. Since there's no man page there's nowhere to list them all. Most got explained individually in News News though.

Thanks for the reply. That leads me rather automatically to rephrase my question: "Why no man page?" And (sorry to be such a newb) what is News News? Do you mean just http://news.ycombinator.com/news ? If so the SEARCH button/form is proving hard for me to find !?¿?!

There is no search. See: searchyc.com

20 karma – downvote comments.

200 karma – make polls (http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll).

250 karma – customize the top bar background color.

??? karma – flag posts and comments (on their individual page).

Flagging is much lower; somewhere in the 100s.

I just created a poll with karma of 196

I have 47 and cannot downvote.I can flag since around my twenties thought.

At 600+ karma, you get infinite bonus mushrooms and infinite ammo. You have to beat the game twice on impossible mode in the military suit and max out all your guns, though, even the stupid one that takes forever to fire and then the zombie eats your head because you were sitting there trying to warm it up instead of shooting zombies, which would have been the logical thing to do.

At 1000+ karma, you take off your helmet and guess what you're a chick. If you win three times in a row on impossible mode with perfect karma without getting shot once, using nothing but the annoying gun that takes forever, you take off your armor and guess what you're a hot chick. Then you can play the game again wearing a bikini.

At 2000+ karma, Paul Graham comes to your house, tells you the meaning of life, and makes you a sandwich. It is the best sandwich known to man. Only rich people can make this sandwich.

These numbers are way too low. I'd have to have gone to 94 people's houses and made them sandwiches. (I already explained the meaning of life in a footnote in "Great Hackers.")

Hmmm... I'm getting close to my 2000... Can I request a chicken sandwich with my zen awakening?

Rumor has it that at 20,000 karma you get to know nickb's true identity.

[3] I think this is what people mean when they talk about the "meaning of life." On the face of it, this seems an odd idea. Life isn't an expression; how could it have meaning? But it can have a quality that feels a lot like meaning. In a project like a compiler, you have to solve a lot of problems, but the problems all fall into a pattern, as in a signal. Whereas when the problems you have to solve are random, they seem like noise.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

sudo make me a sandwich :-)

gaius is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

At 4000+ karma you start receiving Christmas cards.

Every two weeks it seems like someone writes this post and it hits the top 10. Astounding.

This is pretty interesting to me. When karma was implemented at /. we used to expose the number, but then the number became why people did things on /. Then we obscured the number by replacing it with english words like "excellent" for the top karma scores, then we started paying off in terms of allow people to moderate and meta-moderate. It was pretty neat at the time, but I have to admit I like HNs system. It seems like it embraces the karma rather than obscuring it as some kind of necessary but lamentable side effect, which is how it sometimes felt at /.