Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Flag please.
The paragraph right above that sentence: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I find it interesting, and the story gratifies my intellectual curiosity beyond belief. Also remember that hackers are typically young and a large part of their psyche can be defined by that monumental event happened almost 10 years ago. Hey, if you look carefully you might find startup opportunities out of understanding of this significant development.
I'm curious: In what way does the story gratify your intellectual curiosity?
I think you're arguing for the sake of arguing, so I won't spend much time going back and forth. But I'm sure someone somewhere is thinking really hard about making an iPhone game that takes advantage of this development (e.g. "Angry CIA").
[no that's not what I was thinking about; one of mine is along the line of American psyche as defined by the event, the pivot (optimism), and the potential impact on customer behavior]
There are lots of things that fascinate me but are not the type of thing I would expect to see on HN. This is one of them. It seems pretty damn clear to me that this is off-topic here, but whatever, the people have spoken and they decided they want to discuss it anyway so who am I to say anything.
But I will say that your attempts at justifying it seem rather flimsy.
Thought experiment: Could your argument also be applied to just about any other clearly-off-topic news story? Say, the Grizzlies beating the Spurs in the NBA playoffs?
Interesting? yep.
Someone making an iPhone game out of it? probably already done
Satisfies some hacker's intellectual curiosity? Sure. I'm still trying to figure out how they've put their team together and are gelling at the right time.
Belongs on HN? Nope.
9/11 and the War on Terror have defined my generation. The death of one of the most focal figures of this conflict will likely have massive effects. There could be plenty of interesting discussion on what will happen as a result of this.
Unfortunately, as with most political topics, responses seem to be largely simple reaction, rather than in depth analysis. It's possible that this could lead to interesting discussion here, but it mostly didn't, in my opinion.
Now, does it belong on Hacker News? I don't know. My first thought was "politics/news, flag it", but I'm less sure now that I think about it. If we occasionally get topics like this that are massive news, but not necessarily directly HN, I think it's ok. But if we start getting them daily, something has gone wrong. Every once in a while for a world-changing event is fine, but it should only be for truly momentous news.