Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is entirely true.

Y-Combinator uses Hacker News as a vehicle to attract the best technology talent in the world and display job openings to that talent. I love HN and have no issues with YC doing that, but let's not pretend that it is entirely altruistic.

Ad-free != altruistic

But it's not ad-free, the ads[1] just blend in better.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

Good point :)

HN does have ads, just not a lot of them. Once or twice a day there's a recruiting ad for a YC firm inserted among the submitted stories. Doesn't have comments or upvote/flag buttons, and is just inserted between the regular stories according to some algorithm. Similar format to the way Twitter displays ads inserted among tweets that look like a tweet, except YC only makes the space available to companies in its incubator, rather than selling it.

If I ever come across a page with a lot of ads I usually just open it up in links/lynx.

hN is an advertisement / product-placement.