Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeta0134 | Hacker News Reader

I can't read this article without paying for a subscription.

Forgive my ignorance of procedure with something like this; should the title perhaps include an indication that the article is not free? I didn't see any guidelines concerning paid / subscription articles in the FAQ.

View on HN

I'm not sure if it's documented, but for WSJ you can click the 'web' link, or do the equivalent of what the web link does.

This only works if the search term matches the title exactly. For instance, when the submission still had its original title (which matched the article's title), it worked. Then someone edited it and it now doesn't work. You have to open the article, select the title, right click > Search Google, then click the result from there.

I submitted it with the appropriate title. Not sure why it was changed.

Bleh. I just tried it in three different browsers and hit the paywall each time. It's too bad, I've had this condition for years. I guess I'll have to do my own reading on the side.

What is the 'web' link?

The link near the top of this page (HackerNews) that says "web". It's in an easy-to-miss list of light grey links.

Thanks, I never noticed that.

Look under the title of the comment thread. There is a link that literally says "web".

It looks like it checks for a referrer from Google.com. If I visit the page from Google without a referrer, it blocks me from reading it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Take a look at this extension if you wanna read WSJ: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paywall-pass/

That helped when the web+google workaround didn't. Thank you!

The supposed WSJ paywall workarounds have never worked for me. I find WSJ posts to HN entirely useless.

Try googling the article name and opening it from the search results.

This worked for me, but only when I googled the exact article name. I had to open up the article (in "pay or else" mode), copy the title from there, paste that into Google, and then click on the same search result that had failed many times prior. It finally opened the article up for me.

What a mess! Thanks for the help though. :D

Click the "web" link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com