Because of the guidelines:

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

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

For me, the "interesting" thing means a deeper knowledge of some facet of the world, not shallow reporting of breaking news.

IIRC when the other Malaysian Airlines plane went missing that went up on HN, and that was before all the 'hacker friendly' tracking technique stories.

A modern airliner (seemingly) disappearing without a trace is interesting, even from a technology perspective.

A modern airliner getting shot down by a SAM is fairly boring from a tech perspective. Sadly it's not even a particularly unique occurence over the past few decades.

People are unfortunately probably going to post stuff like this, guidelines or not. It gets flagged and or moderated down pretty quickly in most cases, though.

Why unfortunately? In such cases, HN usually provides a lot of insightful technical comments. If a mainstream news item considers technology or failures thereof, I don't see why it doesn't belong on HN.

This article has been knocked off the front page again :(

The prior article was also administratively removed from the front page, even though it had a really high score https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8049813

I actually enjoy HN's more intelligent commentary, technical expertise, and fact checking on huge mainstream news stories.

A lot of dupes were removed, but not the original discussion :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8048083

(doesn't have a reference to MH17, no idea where B772 comes from)

But it was heavily flagged. After an hour, it was at a far lower position than other stories with a fraction of the votes of the same age (e.g. the Nimrod link).