Hacker News Reader

Comment by drats | Hacker News Reader

This is the third time I've clicked on a link on the HN frontpage today and been sent to a NYT login page rather than something interesting. I know that "(nytimes.com)" is behind the link but I feel it behooves the submitter to point out that it is required: that open access should be able to be safely assumed.

View on HN

I think this most often happens when the submitter for some reason didn't get the login screen. The NYT seems to be actively varying when it prompts people, in order to keep links to their stuff included in "the online conversation". Some cases where there's no prompt: 1) I think anyone from an .edu IP range; 2) if you follow a link from a big link-sharing site like Reddit (or Google News); 3) if it's your first nytimes click of the day.

HN seems to not be big enough to get the #2 treatment, so people who find a story on Reddit or Google News and then submit to HN might not notice that it went from no-prompt to prompt-required. People who hadn't read any previous nytimes stories that day might also not notice. More info: http://www.businessinsider.com/janet-robinson-online-paywall...

Try my weekend project: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.nytimes.com...

Very nice. Are you using a variation of the Arc90 readability algorithm or something else? Aha I just saw you talk about them in your "about" page. I was going to do something similar with the python readability port[1] and Flask but hadn't got around to it. I am glad someone did, and did it far more impressively than I could have.

[1]https://github.com/gfxmonk/python-readability

Thanks! I took Readability and ported it over to C#. It's not an exact port as I don't have the DOM and some features of JavaScript in C#. It's using the same algorithm for most of it.

I did other things too, such as making RSS fees contain the full article, pull text from PDFs, rewrite links back through the reader...

Copy the nytimes article link. Go to google and search for the link. You should be able to click through to the article without the login screen. Hope it helps.

http://www.bugmenot.com/view/nytimes.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com