You shouldn't just copy paywalled content onto Hacker News. It's reasonable to question whether paywalled sources should be posted, but you are stealing content and harming the interests of one of the US's major journalism companies in doing so.
The content was not paywalled.
Also, read the FAQ's on paywalled content. It seems Hacker News also disagrees with your definition of steal.
The same NYT article copied verbatim on other news sites. If content was "stolen", which is impossible given the definition of the word steal, then it was done the second the article was published.