How about highest karma per comment? Personally, I consider comments that people post here a lot more useful than original articles. I also tend to mod comments a lot more frequently than stories themselves.

If you look at median comment score, there are three leaders with 3-- garbowza, greendestiny, and pg-- followed by a large number with 2. If you go by average the leaders are:

  (pg           1086 3.92) 
  (rwalker        14 3.57) 
  (cperciva       36 3.36) 
  (jmzachary      21 3.05) 
  (paul          160 2.98) 
  (elq            24 2.96) 
  (uuilly         26 2.88) 
  (greendestiny   23 2.83) 
  (rzwitserloot   18 2.78) 
  (smg            12 2.75) 
  (garbowza       12 2.75) 
  (nostrademons  440 2.75) 
  (pc             12 2.75)

Though it's kind of lame that I lead, the good news is that it looks like the extra upvotes I get for being the creator of the site probably don't amount to more than 1 per comment.

I don't think it's lame that you lead. More people upvote your comments because more people read your comments, and that's to be expected. It would only be blind fandom if all your comments were upvoted.

Isn't "karma / #stories" a bogus measurement, considering that karma is obtained both from stories and from comments? I (as I write this) have 89 karma, but only 8 points of that is from submissions...

How about computing [karma obtained from submissions] / [# of submissions] and [karma obtained from comments] / [# of comments] separately?

Whoops. Sure enough. Good thing I posted the source. I fixed the code and of course got different answers. Now PB is number 1.

(If anyone reading this later wonders what the parent comment is talking about, my original attempt to calculate this was wrong.)

comment-karma/comment is probably a bad measure as commenting on threads that don't make it to the front page would be discouraged.

comment-karma/time is probably a good measure.

I recall nostrademons pointing out that most of his karma came from comments over submissions.

All 40 of his submissions are visible and the average is 6.95

I suspect he'd still have the highest comment/karma average. He makes lots of great comments.

I've also wondered if "karma" as defined here is anything like real world karma (if there is such a thing).

What I mean is: Does upvoting a comment or submission effect your own karma points? Have the folks on the leader board also upvoted a lot? Is there any correlation at all?

hm. i'd rather type something like:

select username, karma, submissions from users where submissions > 10 order by karma desc

but you don't see me running an uber-hip VC firm, do you?

Yeah but realistically that'd just return: ERROR: Unknown column 'submissions' or whatever because you'd probably have a separate submission table. Still, you're right that this simple stuff is what SQL is good at.

But having all that data in an in-memory hash is way more flexible and convenient. He can do any arbitrary operations on it, not just the stuff SQL and stored procedures are good at.

How about karma/comment? or even pageloads/time? :)

Congrats to Nostra