you can almost always go to archive.is or one of the other mirrors and paste in the original link. it will get you past the paywall and also give you a link that will get others past the paywall. it seems to be a monkey-see monkey-do part of the hackernews microculture that if a link is paywalled a commenter will throw up the archive link
gainda|4 months ago
ratelimitsteve|4 months ago
WithinReason|4 months ago