Hacker News Reader

That's quite unclear, yep. He also uses affiliate links to the book on Amazon. Seems shady.

The footnotes in the links point out that they are affiliate links.

I think the shady comment was about profiting from another’s work (even if you’re upfront about it)

I’m not familiar with Amazon’t affiliate program, but it’s my understanding that these don’t typically take money from the author, their commission coming from the platform’s cut instead.

Given that, and seeing as the blog post author was upfront about it, I don’t see a problem with it unless the book’s author objects. Affiliate links don’t even steal credit — they give an author’s work more visibility to people who might be interested in it without cutting into their revenue. A commission is an incentive to share work you enjoy.

Oh I don’t really care about the ethics of any of this I was just pointing out that you seemed to be misunderstanding which aspect the parent was calling shady. It’s not that the affiliate links were poorly labeled, it’s that they were for profiting from the (in the context of the comment) questionably sourced material

Reply on news.ycombinator.com