Didn't pg admit that he uses karma as a criteria in evaluating yc applications? If so that was just an invitation to a bunch of smart hackers to try to game the system.
No, he said that karma as nothing to do with YC application, but that if he sees an application from a user that he knows from HN to be a smart guy, he will look at it more specifically.
In other words, interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments are important, not your absolute karma number, even though of course you're likely to have a high karma if you're a frequent poster of good comments.
That's also why the average is more important than the absolute karma.
