Habitual usage doesn't necessarily correlate to quality, I'd say. People who use Facebook/Twitter also have this sort of muscle reflex developed over time.

That said, HN does have quality content and the signal/noise is way better than sites designed specifically to keep you addicted.

It might not correlate to quality, but if the information found at a website wasn't valued we wouldn't be constantly pulling the site up, just like facebook users do.

I'd argue that this site has a good signal/noise ratio by design and specifically to keep you addicted (where "addicted" means using and constantly returning to the site). This site is just designed to attract people who are put off by the kinds of tricks employed elsewhere

> I'd argue that this site has a good signal/noise ratio by design

Or so we tell ourselves.

Internal polling shows that we are all here by merit and merit alone!

I feel the voting process on HN deserves a lot of credit for the quality of front-page content. I wish a knew more about it, other than karma>500 giving the ability to downvote.

I think they meant quality from a hardware and ops perspective.

Indeed. I find that it's so reliable and fast that I use it to check my internet connection. If I can't hit HN, then something's wrong on my end.

I assumed at first there was a problem with my mobile data connection, before I realized it was actually HN :)

Same here. I thought the my internet was down or I was too far from the router. HN being down was my last thought.

I use example.com for that purpose :p

Wow, it works, but it really seems like it shouldn't. I'd expected reserved domain names to not resolve at all let alone be pingable and point at a working webserver. Has it always had a website?

Yes, it’s always existed. It actually belongs to the IANA and if you Whois it you get: RESERVED-Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

If they're running a mail server too I'm guilty of sending them a lot of spam. [email protected] is what I've always used for people unnecessarily requesting an email addresses

Probably drops everything

Might have tried to curl it from a production system just to make sure it wasn't my internet.

I understood this reference.

I didn't wget it

> For a while, I thought there must be something wrong with my internet connection or DNS config or something.

Definitely thought the same. Then I realized that I'm browsing trough work VPN and had a second thought: what if our admins decided to fight procrastination?

Haha. A building of ours in Canada lost internet at the same time.

When I saw hn was down, I double-checked the news to see if a major part of the internet had gone down.

I bet thousands of people checked their network and DNS settings today. hn is what I use to make sure I have a connection

Same here, it used to be google but at some point it still just starting loading with no internet connection.

Easy to make sure you're not seeing some cached version by doing a search for random string from mashing your keyboard. These days literally any string of characters shorter than 10 will find some sort of result and there's very little chance you have it cached somehow.

Me too! I was, shamefully, in the middle of work so had a mini panic thinking my 5 min HN scroll was gonna become an hour long battle with my connection!