Love these posts; even though the website is heavy on ads, I feel like the tradeoff is that you are opening up your ledger and letting us all glance at it. I have no problem with you wanting me to click an ad or two in the process.
You are genuinely producing content that is valuable to me (at the least, interesting). Thanks for sticking to your guns and continuing to do these series.
I wasn't really aware of the ads (running AdBlock), but I think he is a little bit abusing his blog. I think HN traffic is very valuable if he knows how to leverage it.
As long as people can't game HN points, I don't think there's a problem with people trying to get their ads on front page - Only if enough people thought the content was worth looking at the ads it gets upvoted, so the quality stays good.
(As an aside: I don't know much about this, but wouldn't it be relatively easy to create a couple of dozen hn accounts, set up a script and upvote any post you like.. Indeed, with the amount of geeks visiting the site, I'd be surprised if it hadn't already been done. Anyone care to explain?)
in reply to your aside: you could use something like Twill for command-line navigation script (doesnt work with javascript though I don't think) http://twill.idyll.org/commands.html
You are genuinely producing content that is valuable to me (at the least, interesting). Thanks for sticking to your guns and continuing to do these series.