If someone puts 100 hours into building something like this it's clear they intend on it becoming a legitimate business, this means every single person that visits at initial release is someone that could be a customer or could help the site reach the goals set out by the creator. Anything that can potentially jeopardise this (poor functionality, making it look amateur -- adverts) is pointless. Trading potential success for the advert revenue adsense will bring from a HN post (most posts about the HN traffic bump talk about ~10k page views, so let's say that generates $10 in revenue with a small advert bar) is nonsensical. It'd be better to go and pick pennies up from the street!
There was a person that posted their Youtube channel on reddit a few days ago and they wanted people to review it and give them pointers. I decided to check it out, so I clicked to their channel and was made to watch a 30 second pre-roll advert, I decided that 30 seconds wasn't worth it and closed it. The channel could have been amazing; I could have been the person that watched their video and shared it with my network and that could have triggered great things, but because of very silly short term thinking they lost that.