Today it has been raining heavily, and the only reason I went to my co-working place is because I checked HN in the morning, and figured my internet was down at home because HN didn't work.

I heard from an ISP owner that a common support call was when kids deleted the browser icon on the desktop, the parent thinks internet is down and calls up support. These days almost everyone is using a phone or tablet so it happens less.

Right, HN is the site I check when I'm not sure my connection is working, because it loads so fast. It HN doesn't load, then I'm more likely to walk away from the computer than to check another site.

Or there's some hot topic with more than 2 replies that's making the server pull its hair out...

I worked a place that used to use ‘is HN up?’ as a proxy for ‘does the internet go?’

Time was I would use sun.com to check if the network was up. These days, like you, I use HN.

For decades now pings to yahoo.com to check connectivity have been my only direct interaction with them. If they go away or start responding to pings I could use news.ycombinator.com, but the URL is longer.

ping 1.1.1.1 is my go to for the command line