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.")
[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.
It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.
The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random. [3]
But, let me tell you, it's a _great_fucking_sandwich. It was actually so good, I'm going to register a new username: MORE_SANDWICH and climb the karma ladder again, just so PG makes me another sandwich. I need one... more.... taste...
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.