You're conflating a bunch of disparate ideas with this sentence. HN is not a forum for making you money. That is not its purpose. You are being asked to not use it for that purpose. Taking offense at such a request is, in my opinion, a fairly black mark against your sincerity.
I'm providing something that some people find useful, and since in this particular instance, there happens to be a way to make a tiny bit off it to reinvest in more books, I'm not ashamed to do so.
Making money is obviously - very, very obviously - not my primary use of this site.
You know another thing people do here? We promote our own stuff that we worked hard to build. Other communities intensely dislike that, but we don't, as long as it's kept within reason.
When TezzellEnt posted a new version of the link, he/she did so because that little referral token is a sort of egg on your shirt in precisely the same way; it's unexpected. It's not necessarily an "idea that making money is bad." Nobody has said anything like that (except you, to refute it, of course). Heck, part of why it's unclean has to do with domain separation: if the egg is on your fork, it is 'clean', but if it falls on your shirt then it magically becomes 'dirt'. The egg of course is chemically identical, but one of them appears in a domain where you don't expect it -- an otherwise blank shirt. Similarly rmrfrmrf's first complaint ("issues arise when the content you produce for this site is influenced by your desire to make money") is not a referendum on your contributions as a whole but a statement that "you're crossing two domains here, and if those domains cross too much then this site will not be a place which we enjoy frequenting."
Because I haven't actually engaged the ideological side yet I might as well do that too. You're not just "getting money from Amazon" but also being co-opted into "advertising for Amazon" -- and, as you say, you were bought in this way for only a few cents. What you think of as a strength -- that you only make a tiny amount off of it -- is in some sense actually a weakness. acjohnson55 put this above as being "thought of as a shill."
I think for a lot of people, it's a fairly reflexive dislike of referral links, rather than something they think through deeply. But at heart lies this idea that "OMG, he made some money off it! Impure! Impure!", when it's pretty easy to judge, on a case by case basis, whether a person is contributing or spamming that on a site like this.
Also: any links I put probably would have been to Amazon anyway, out of convenience, although sometimes when Wikipedia has a good summary, I just link to that. So my behavior does not really change other than attaching the referral code.
This is a typo, right?
Would read again. A+++ =)
So? People advertise their startups and even hire employees here all the time.
HN hides long urls, thus it's possible for the referral part to be hidden, meaning people might not be aware of the referral link.
Asking people to declare a referral link doesn't seem to be that onerous.
I'm surprised that someone who has been online for as long as you have is not aware of the antipathy there is towards referral links. Some people really don't like them.
Online, some people really don't like a lot of things! Pretty much anything out there has its detractors. I know they don't like referral links, but I think in the context of a community like this one where it's easy to check on the activity of others, it's a silly attitude, and I won't hesitate to say so.
Near as I'm aware, davidw's Amazon affiliate links are not part of a YC-incubated startup.