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Comment by motiejus | Hacker News Reader

Folks, there is a good reason this is a subscriber-only content. It takes time and effort (and money!) to keep us up to date. For such a long time.

This is the 5'th SubscriberLink over the last week on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Please, folks, subscribe, and let Corbet put the subscriber links here himself. The LWN weekly editions are definitely worth every penny.

Edit: I am paying LWN since 2012 and intend to keep paying for as long as there is LWN.

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> This is the 5'th SubscriberLink over the last week on HN

Its the first post to gain any meaningful traction

> Please, folks, subscribe, and let Corbet put the subscriber links here himself. The LWN weekly editions are definitely worth every penny.

According to corbet its totally fine if every now and then a subscriber link pops up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966033

> As long as the posting of subscriber links in places like this is occasional, I believe it serves as good marketing for LWN - indeed, every now and then, I even do it myself. We just hope that people realize that we run nine feature articles every week, all of which are instantly accessible to LWN subscribers.

The LWN FAQ also considers it no problem: https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks

> Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?

> Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.

I think posting this on HN does not defeat the purpose of gaining subscribers, but supports them. At least for me it worked. After reading some LWN articles on HN I decided to become a paying subscriber.

Telling people they are not allowed to post such links here actually IMHO hurts LWN.

But they didn't tell them that its not allowed, they just encouraged people to subscribe to this excellent publication.

"and let Corbet put the subscriber links here himself"

Another, more recent statement from corbet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852477

Is "SubscriberLink" a way to share paywalled LWN stuff with non-subscribers? Damn, I had no idea. I just presumed they un-paywalled stuff every now and again (like after N days or so).

I believe all paywalled content becomes free to read two weeks after initial publication

Ah ok. I should still probably sub, I tend to read LWN when it pops up here and never really gave it a moments thought before :O

In my humble opinion it is definitely worth it. All people over at LWN do tremendous job and should really be supported.

I haven’t even used Linux for a few years now. Still pay for LWN. It’s so worth supporting.

I can honestly say the resources at LWN have helped my career immensely. The in depth series on topics like namespaces and io_uring directly allowed me to tackle some hard projects - without those articles I would have steered clear of "magic i don't understand" and the relevant projects would have suffered.

It's definitely worth subscribing if you have the means (and the low cost of subscriptions suggests a lot of readers here have the means).

I'd agree that often with new features and subsytems recent LWN articles are the best documentation around.

Highly recommend.

Just to show support for corbet and his team. He could keep the articles paywalled forever, but is making them free after a week. Becoming a paying member is our way to say thank you for his fair attitude (and keeping ads at minimum level).

I work at totaly different field in IT, most articles are just "wow, that's interesting" for me and - I still keep LWN's subscriptionm and it is the only one I have.

Indeed. They even provide a mailing list you can subscribe to which will notify you whenever an article goes free. I think you need to have an account with them firstly though.

It's (usually?) less than that.

https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn

> Must I subscribe to read the Weekly Edition?

> No, the Weekly Edition becomes freely available to all readers one week after its publication.

> I just presumed they un-paywalled stuff every now and again (like after N days or so).

All of LWN's paywalled articles become free for everyone to view after a week. During the week that articles are paywalled any subscriber can share currently paywalled content by creating a SubscriberLink.

LWN produces some of the best highly technical Linux and Linux adjacent content on the web.

If they wanted to keep it subscriber only, they could achieve that by requiring users to be logged in.

It's clear that the intention is to allow for sharing (although there is the question of "at what scale?").

Then there's the page itself:

> Welcome to LWN.net

> The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net!

The people who run the site seem to have less of a problem with sharing its content than you do.

I only found out about LEB via links shared on HN. I haven’t subscribed yet but will consider it once I landed a job. I don’t think that sharing their most interesting articles is hurting them, more like the opposite.

Thanks for the reminder. I was a subscriber for a few years and then I stopped when I hit a long time crunch with no time to read much news. I just subscribed now that I feel I have some leisure time again for this and HN in general.

Hacker News is not the place to post paywalled content, whether you believe the reasons are valid or not.

Rules are a bit more subtle: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html (see: "Are paywalls ok?")

In fact, the only thing the rules call out as not ok with regards to pay walls is complaining about them.

... or posting paywalled links that don't have work-arounds.

It is according to the faq[0]

---

Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.

---

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

i really hope substack takes off, the strategy behind pay content is much more responsible than javascript "walls"

It should be pointed out that Corbet himself has come out in support of subscriber links posted here and at other places. That's why they provided that capability. That said it shouldn't be abused and I suspect if it ends up becoming too much they might remove that ability.

I agree with one of the other posters, we should support quality journalism, and lwn definitely is.

If LWN disappears tomorrow, I'll get my news elsewhere. Thank you for your concerns.

Where else do you get in depth kernel reporting?

Like the other poster said, in the source code.

That's not reporting.

I recommend browsing their index pages, and pause and ponder where else you'd find such high quality, curated, approachable content, in such concentration. You could suggest the kernel's own documentation, but that's more developer-facing.

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