Title is misleading. To me, the headline "AIDS vaccine in final testing" implies that they are undergoing their final testing to verify that it does indeed prevent people from contracting HIV. That is not what it means. Rather, it means that they are in the final rounds to verify that the vaccine is safe, before they start human trials.

A more accurate title, to my ears, would be "HIV vaccine almost ready for human trials."

I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention, even though I'm not such a high-ranking commenter.

Am I the only one that wipes the OEM operating system as soon as I buy a computer? Even if I'm putting Windows right back on it?

I started doing it because of the crap they bundle in there, but this seems like an unintended good reason to do so as well.

Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles?

That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.

Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures something.

If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said again and see if they were actually right.

Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?

Maybe this is paranoia, but I'm beginning to find a lot of threads like this (and a few yesterday about 'how to hire people') actively coercive: "Contribute to Open Source or Don't Get Hired".

There are a lot of increasingly shrill remarks out there about how everyone should be doing open source projects in their 'spare time', so no-one has any excuse not to have a track record of FOSS contributions... frankly, it's bullshit.

I work in a closed-source shop (for some very good reasons, we can't open) and our devs do sterling work of a sophistication not seen in most projects, open or otherwise, solving a very difficult and rather open-ended algorithmic problem. On a good day, we get a lot of sophisticated work done.

Strangely, at the end of one of these good days, no one wants to go home and write a big fucking pile of code - we have girlfriends/wives/families that haven't seen us for 12 hours and probably aren't going to want to use the remaining hours (and typing time) to write MORE code. Even if that was a good idea - we are paid for full-time work here which means ideally we go home and relax, not flail away on endless side projects.

Why should my computer have auditing capability, without my explicit knowledge or me making the decision to put it there? Who is it good for?

Yes. The majority of regular people would never do that, or even know where to start.