But there's a sadness about the Yahoo situation that invites joking as a coping mechanism. If we don't laugh, we'll have to cry. Or rant.

And speaking of rants: plenty of upvoted, 'serious' comments about this incident are just variants of "HUH-hah, look at Yahoo's latest screwup!" Those can be even worse for reasoned discourse than a few silly quips in one tangent. But HN smiles upon the hyper-critical and mock-aghast sort of rhetorical competition.

When you click the period it actually launches a black helicopter.

It isn't actually meant to do this, but the guy who wrote the code left a while back and nobody knows how to fix it, or even where the helicopters are being sent. However there are unconfirmed reports of an interesting pile of scrap metal growing at the bottom of Jerry Yang's garden.