Do you honestly think that every article posted on a product's blog should include a disclaimer that the post may contain information highlighting the usefulness of their product?
To be fair, it seems from the article that it's their interactions with the community using the feature that shits on it. Or do you have specific counterpoints to their arguments made against tiered storage in kafka? As far as I can tell there are two points being made against tiered storage: operational burden is increased and networking costs (which if you've read any of their other posts or visited their homepage, is a primary motivation for the existence of their product) are not reduced.
> I agree but I hate it when at the end of an article I realize it was just an ad.
If you wanted to be reductive: if the domain ends in .com, you can assume the submission is an ad. Some ads are better quality and worth discussing and some aren't.
More and more blog posts that make it to the HN front page are content marketing.
Nothing nefarious about it -- it's just a deliberate strategy on the part of companies like Retool or Supabase or Fly or whatever to market their services to this target market.
I have no idea how many actual sales conversations it leads to, but it sure is effective at convincing many HN readers that those are cool companies selling cool things...