Hacker News Reader

There are tons of solutions including folks re-typing the article, but I think the way better course of action is to keep pay-walled articles off HN

Or use the Referer Control Chrome extension [0] and set the referer to http://news.google.com for all requests to http://www.wsj.com.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn...

Just found that! Thanks!

How do websites actually implement that?

Checking the referrer header.

Right, forgot about that. I wish something like this was rolled into AdBlock, but it'd be nice for viewing NYT and WSJ:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn...

I don't know how WSJ does, but Press+, a vendor used by many local newspapers uses Local Storage to assign a GUID, and then they track the GUID. It's easily defeated.

They can see what the inbound referrer is to their page.