you can almost always go to archive.is or one of the other mirrors and paste in the original link. it will get you past the paywall and also give you a link tha

you can almost always go to archive.is or one of the other mirrors and paste in the original link. it will get you past the paywall and also give you a link that will get others past the paywall. it seems to be a monkey-see monkey-do part of the hackernews microculture that if a link is paywalled a commenter will throw up the archive link