While I can't speak for Hacker News as a whole and I'm going to talk about clicks and not purchases strictly, I am willing to talk about developers more general

While I can't speak for Hacker News as a whole and I'm going to talk about clicks and not purchases strictly, I am willing to talk about developers more generally who frequently say things like "advertising doesn't work on me". Collectively, they are mistaken and it does work on them. I work on advertising at Read the Docs and when we were first added to the main ad blocker lists our revenue went down. We were 100% pay per click at that time and our revenue went down by the same percentage as the number of ad impressions went down. Looking at it statistically, developers who run ad blockers still click on ads at the same rate as those that don't as long as they actually see the ad.