The NY Times has been charging for its product since 1851. It's only the past 15 years or so that the latest generation thinks that a newspaper company charging money to cover its costs of doing business plus a small profit are somehow "wrong."
You're entitled to feel this way, too, but many people do pay, and like to discuss what they read here.
That is fine and dandy, but it would be ideal if the nytimes.com subscribers could go and discuss articles on the nytimes.com website. Anyone who can read the article is already supposed to be a subscriber.
It is hardly a good outcome to invite comment on HN by people only able to read the title.
It's entirely impossible to participate in the conversation without having read the article in question. At least drop the paywall when you notice a surge in traffic, right?
Doesn't seem paywalled here (in France). If it's only paywalled in the small fraction of the world that are the usa, it's still quite open to read and discuss.
Not sure if it works for NYT but I curled a news site the other day and it happily gave me the paywalled article. User agent hacking is annoying. They want Google to index their search results without actually letting the user see it.
Probably the order of the scripts that are ran in the page. You probably stopped the page-load before it got to the paywall script. This is why I like NoScript, PrivacyBadger and AdBlock+ (some folks also like uBlock). Once you pinpoint the script and block it, you are trouble-free for a few months (until they change something on the script/paywall)
You're entitled to feel this way, too, but many people do pay, and like to discuss what they read here.