Yes. About 10 seconds after first seeing the blank page. The trace looks healthy and ends ok. Pinging news.ycombinator.com directly drops nothing. HTTP apparently is where it chokes. Thank you for your interest. EDIT: telneting to tcp 80 just get's me a killed connection when I press "G".

use a proxy then ?

I tried the telnet trick and it works by simply typing GET / HTTP/1.0

'G' doesn't do much normally, or did you mean that it disconnects you as soon as you type G ?

Is your DNS working properly ? This is the IP news.ycombinator.com should resolve to:

174.132.225.106

>> or did you mean that it disconnects you as soon as you type G ?

Yes.

>> Is your DNS working properly ?

Yes.

Thanks for all the replies. It was a peering problem in the end. I guess they didn't like the pink slip idea in the end. That or the thing broke other more important things for them.