In a way its a good thing. Everyone thinks Yahoo! has a lot of potential, it is just that they aren't living up to it. Better to be on that side than not having any potential to live up to.

One could also wonder why only Yahoo's negative press gets voted up on HN.

Not true, Yahoo's release of S4 was voted up tons just last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870029

The story isn't really about yahoo, though. Yahoo is not in the title or the url, isn't prominently displayed on the page, and only mentioned in a few comments. I didn't even realize it was from yahoo until I read your comment and I saw the story when it was originally posted. Checking searchyc, the only s4 story that became really popular was the only one that didn't mention yahoo in the title.

That's a good point. I should have said mostly negative press.