The HN rules are that paywalled content can be posted only if it's trivially bypassable via a free tool. The NYTimes links work on fresh IP addresses as part of a free allowance for new readers, which is why the proxy-based archive website archive.today is able to get through. I'm not a big fan of this being allowed, but there is some thought to it at least, they aren't just allowing anything.

IMO a good approach would be to surface the status of links to readers, with an icon for "pay-walled" or "register-walled", then see how organic voting affects things.

Probably the problem is ignored because of well known archive sites that circumvent the subscription issue. But, I do agree with the suggestion of marking posts as paywalled, to give people more choice on whether to open them.

while that would be nice, generaly there are many knowledgeable comments several pay grades abovethe nyt staff, here in the comments, which if you wait for them to build and then do a page search for your terms of interest, can often take you painlessly to a susinct synopsis of the issues under discussion

I’m just always amazed that this many HN readers pay for the NY Times or any of the other publications constantly posted here with paywalls.