Paywalls are ok if there's a workaround. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. Yes, it sucks, but the alternatives suck worse. The Economist has been the source for a lot of good HN discussions, as have other soft-paywalled sites. We don't allow hard-paywalled ones.
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...