I can always read WSJ articles by searching for the title in Facebook search then clicking through from the official WSJ posting.
That workaround is often mentioned in the HN discussion threads, so it's fairly well known.
If this method accessible for people who don't want to use Facebook? If not, then I would not consider it a general circumvention measure.
If you don't want to use Facebook, pasting a WSJ link into outline.com will also yield the full article:
Of course you're fully entitled to not use Facebook, but that needn't deprive everyone else of being made aware of the content and being able to access and discuss it, either by using the Facebook workaround or paying for a subscription.
Facebook has over 2Bn users. Many of them are on HN. The debate about whether or not that's a good thing is orthogonal to the fact that Facebook search is a viable workaround that allows the anyone who chooses to use it, the option of reading WSJ articles.
>Are paywalls ok?
>It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
The implication is that paywalls without workarounds (like WSJ) aren't OK.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html