Hacker News Reader

Headline: "Giant mystery object turned out being a banal paywall"

Don't worry, it's just linkbait. The article is two full pages of wild guesses on what they think is blocking it.

Open it in private browsing mode.

Oh, I had never tried the "privacy mode" of Firefox! Thanks for the heads up!

However why is this working? I already had disabled JS, so the only thing I can think of is my location (Europe), but "privacy mode" will not prevent anyone from seeing my IP, so... wtf?

EDIT: cookies, of course! I had forgotten I already read the NYT recently. Thanks!

EDIT': confirmed by disabling "privacy mode" again, deleting cookies did it.

I'm pretty sure that it's based on cookies. They let you read some number of articles per month for free and once you hit that number, they show the paywall.