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Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

It's a revisited taxation on a gullible readership, many affiliate links there covering all budget points.

My PC has both a standard, non-hybrid magnetic disk for volume, and a very, very fast SSD for speed. I use the SSD for development and, humorously, Steam games. It's nice, but given that I have 8GB of RAM and most everything I touch regularly is cached...and I virtually never turn my PC entirely off (S3 sleep is your friend)...outside of database tests it just doesn't make that much of a difference.

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Interesting. I didn't notice the affiliate links the first time and then when I did look, I saw domain names like kqzyfj.com. What purpose does it serve to hide the fact that it's an affiliate link behind a disposable domain name? Are there things like Firefox extensions that would search for "commissionjunction.com" and replace it with non-affiliate links?

I always look for affiliate links when bloggers suddenly start shilling merchandise outside of their competency.

I don't mind when there's an obvious "best prices" DIV at the bottom or wherever, where its purpose and commercial motivation is obvious, but embedded affiliate links just feel....scummy.

It's like getting invited to dinner and the host starts an Amway pitch. It colours the entire presentation.

> It's like getting invited to dinner and the host starts an Amway pitch.

I respond in the same way, I leave, never to return.

Maybe try not attending dinners titled "revisiting Amway products". Just a suggestion.

I realize this is a bit off topic but how do you feel about disclosure right there in the blog post? Something like "if you follow that link, I'll get some money"? I wrestle with this every time I link to something in a blog post. I've mostly settled on the affiliate link disclosure followed by an affiliate free one.

Those weird domains are Commission Junction. That's how they hand out the links, nothing Jeff did on his own. They moved all their affiliate links to a set of gibberish domains many years ago... I can only speculate why, but software that removes tracking cookies, and malware that rewrites affiliate links to credit the sales to someone else, are the first things that come to mind.

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