Judging from my upvotes the best way to go about it is to go to a popular comment in an over-crowded thread and leave your short, witty and unoffending thoughts. This method is probably the most time efficient. Spray and pray.

Worry about contributing positively to the site.

Karma will take care of itself.

And really, it's not worth much.

All described in the guidelines.

Post useful stuff, make useful comments.

Write good comments.

Submissions get you an order of magnitude more karma than comments.

It may be different for "famous" people like tptacek and Animats who are instantly recognized in any comment thread, so that lots of highly upvoted comments make up for the comment/submission discrepancy.

Odds of getting a good submission upvoted are very, very low relative to the odds of having a good comment upvoted (will almost always be seen). From an EV perspective, it is better.

See the guidelines for details, but in particular be civil and substantive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you.

Just post The Right Opinion™ and Independent Thinkers™ from the Silicon Valley® California© will upvote you.

Be careful, sarcasm, facts, or the inconvenient truth can cause downvotes.

It is also very important, to always post in a manner which cannot insult a demographic (eg. Independent Thinkers™), unless the insulted demographic does not represent the The Right Opinion™ (eg. realists, conservatives, anti-globalists, Drumpf voters, law abiding tax paying majorities, especially males can always be insulted).

> Be careful, sarcasm, facts, or the inconvenient truth can cause downvotes.

Is there a way to figure out a comment's ratio of upvotes to downvotes? Sometimes I see my comment's score oscillating...

No.

This is, frankly, a really annoying aspect of many commenting systems. It's among the reasons I prefer range-based voting (say 1-5 scale) rather than up/down. On the back end it's possible to do some aggregate modeling that works out, for large numbers, somewhat equivalently, but this handles thin data poorly.

Submit content suited to the site, as per Hacker News guidelines. Hopefully if you've been there a while you are aware of this, but here it is again just in case: Hacker News Guidelines. The first two paragraphs in the guidelines sum it all up:!

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Timing. I don't live in the US myself, and since roughly half of the site's users are in the US, the time of day makes a big difference in seeing your submission hitting the front page or floating to the bottom.

Submit famous person death article, SJW or anti think piece, apple articles or articles that claim the latest FOTM siver bullet is bullshit.