Hacker News Reader

This link is safer to say "always works"

Basically you can Google the title and click on first result to see it without limitations of a paywall

Cool, HN is listed as the 2nd "News" result for that query.

You can use ref control to make it look like your the Google news bot https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/ .

Isn't it illegal according to Google to serve different content based upon the Googlebot's User-Agent ?

Only if the content is different for people who got there by clicking a link in Google search results, apparently.

This does not work for me.

Worked for me, also Mac Chrome.

this link is non functional for me on Mac Chrome.

Not for me.