How I Read the New York Times | Hacker News Reader

How I Read the New York Times

andrewacove.posterous.com

13 pointsandrewacove15 comments

Or you could get over it, create an account, sign in once, and then never worry again.

exactly. i can't remember the last time i saw the nytimes login page.

You do realize that if this was any other website you (or others making this comment) would be up in arms all over the internet over it, including these very HN comments?

Is this really the same HackerNews community that goes ape shit over the smallest usability no-nos on random Joe's website, but is perfectly fine with NYT practically stonewalling their entire website behind a login screen?

I'm not perfectly fine with it - I just decided it was worth it many years ago and never thought about it since. The value of the NYT is, to me, obvious and enormous. Some new random webapp cannot make that claim.

I guess the value for me isn't. A lot of the time, I don't go through the effort to read it.

rms? Love Emacs and the other stuff you've done for decades, thanks! :-)

There is a solution.

Write a Firefox/Chrome/.* plugin which randomly generates a login name and password every time it sees the login screen -- and after the page is opened, logs out again... just to be clean.

Except when I clear my cookies (rare), or use a different browser or computer (often). Also, I'll forget the password unless I reuse one I type more often, but password reuse is bad. Better for NYTimes to "get over it" and stop with the registration wall.

Try my small project http://viewtext.org

Holy crap, you add full article text to RSS feeds? My hero!

One way you can do this same thing, just simpler, is append "http://google.com/url?q= before the NYTimes URL. You still have to click through the Google XSRF prevention page, but it's a lot simpler and doesn't depend on the Googlebot having hit the page yet.

In Chrome a Google search is in the right-click menu after selecting the article title text. Four clicks and no typing beats URL hacking, and Googlebot is so fast these days that it's always seen the page before I got there, and it's always the first hit for the full article title (even without quotes).

or use http://www.nytimes.com/chrome/

http://www.bugmenot.com/

RefControl extension: set HTTP Referer to news.google.com or similar.

Right click, open in Incognito works if you are using Chrome.

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