Ditto. This is a tough situation. WSJ articles are generally high quality and probably worth paying for, but if there's an unbypassable paywall then there's no reason to feature it on HN.
We could use it as a prompt. Maybe the comments could be a zone to talk about quants and wall street. That might be useful, but it'd have to be explicit.
EDIT: I've actually wished for prompts on HN, for what it's worth. Other sites typically have ways of starting conversations without articles, and Ask HN's usually die except for a few lucky ones. Usually you end up in a situation where you want to talk about X but have to wait until a tangentially related comment is posted, and then sort of shoehorn it in awkwardly. Being able to spin up a "Quant thread" would be nice without a specific topic or question.
Regardless of its status on HN, I should consider subscribing. It looks like it's about $400/year for a digital subscription. A little over a dollar a day is very reasonable. And it looks like there are specials going on right now: $198/year for the first year; or $99 for six months; or $1 for two months. https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusmemorial17/
As for using the headline as a prompt for discussion, I'm quite sure that's all that drives many commenters on HN :)
I appreciate your comment and I mean absolutely no ill will by my response, but in my opinion, $400 a year (or ~$1 a day) is not even remotely close to a reasonable price, for two reasons:
1) my friends and I write to each other every day with more nuanced, researched, investigative journalism/analysis than the WSJ could ever hope to put out. I frequently release anonymous pastebins of my (hopefully impartial, unlike WSJ) analysis for free as a public service and I hope someone promotes them
2) the amount you quoted, $400, is somewhere around 1-2 months worth of total income for easily a billion people in this world. $400 would be considered an excellent monthly salary in a variety of countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Ukraine.
So for likely the majority of the world, $400 would be almost unjustifiably high for words on a page that don't really offer any profitable or immediately actionable ideas
We could use it as a prompt. Maybe the comments could be a zone to talk about quants and wall street. That might be useful, but it'd have to be explicit.
EDIT: I've actually wished for prompts on HN, for what it's worth. Other sites typically have ways of starting conversations without articles, and Ask HN's usually die except for a few lucky ones. Usually you end up in a situation where you want to talk about X but have to wait until a tangentially related comment is posted, and then sort of shoehorn it in awkwardly. Being able to spin up a "Quant thread" would be nice without a specific topic or question.