>in response to referral link comment: I host the site on my own dime so I didn't think getting $.25 from DO would make me a bad person...also, I really don't have time to learn windows to make instructions. I'm a grad student and make slightly above minimum wage annually, if I were to be evil and greedy I'd probably not be doing what I do with my life. I'm giving away thousands of hours of work and data I could make money off of doing evil things.
>its not worth putting the link there and have people judge you / your intentions.
This makes no sense to me. His intentions are clear. Far more clear than the intentions of third party HTTP requests on the big websites you visit. And you didn't even need to hear it from him himself to know that he hosts his site and needs a few shekels to support it. Of course, you're entitled to your own opinion, but I could really care less if people "judge" me for a DO link, and I hope the tilbert feels the same way.
I don't understand in general this hate for people who post referral links. Do you not hover over a link before you click it? See all the garbage appended to the query string in the URL? If I don't want to click it, I don't. I don't hate the person for adding a referral link. I don't understand the hate for the people who do. Again, you're entitled to your own opinion but I'm not a fan of this minutiae being hammered in this HN thread. I'll just go to the website on a clean window and search the same product/website/service.
Finally, the third party advertisers are judging him far more harshly for this software, anyways. Their corrupt model is (in a small way) subverted. If he was worried about "judgment" he wouldn't have offered this software in the first place.