I personally use : http://perdu.com (up since 1998) Which translate into:

Lost on the Internet? Don't worry, we will help * <----- you are here

What fast IP do you use when you suspect you're connected to the internet but can't resolve DNS? I'm looking for a good non-Google IP (because China)

Level3's DNS is easy to remember at 4.2.2.1. Or is that Verizon's?

You should only use 4.2.2.1 or 4.2.2.2 if you're an actual Level3 customer. While they do respond to public requests, they're not intended for public use, unlike Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 servers.

Interesting. I seen to remember that at one point the reverse lookup for one of the 4.2.2.x addresses was "dont-steal-service-etc.somebody". I just send an ICMP ping when I need an IP to check a connection. I also seem to recall reading that the 4.2.2.x resolvers were multi-homed, but in both cases my memory could be faulty.

Or google's at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 ?

I still ping the IP address of my college's DNS server, all these years later. Muscle memory dies hard.

I'd love to see their stats. They have basically 0 content and I hit them 10 times a day.

Hah, glad it's not just me. It's also the thing I hit if I'm trying to think of what I was doing/am idle for a moment... typing 'news.' just seems to flow from my fingers if they're unoccupied.

There used to be a race between Google news (news.google.com) and Hacker News to be the top suggestion for me, hacker news has pulled away to a strong lead recently.

Ctrl-T, N, Enter :/

same here, I visit this site so much that only typing 'N' does the job.

Ditto. Done with catching up on other stuff? CMD-T n enter. When it's perpetual tab gets closed, that is.

Yep, same for me. I'll be staring at the screen in thought, then up pops a Hacker News tab.

I have this habit too and it's deeply disturbing. Actively fighting it!

Why fight it? Visiting a technological/intellectual inspiration source definitely goes in my list of positive habits.

For me, because it can consume my entire workday. Has done that today, really.

I use HN because I can never trust whether anymore whether Google is really loading from a remote source or is just doing some aggressive caching magic (or whether Chrome just has the Google homepage baked in now).

In terms of uptime, HN has been hosted on a single server (until recently... I saw mention of a failover server). If you are just looking for a lightweight site to load, example.com is great.

Might want to spread that out over a few sites. Any one can go down.

Alexa's top 10 sites is usually a pretty good set.