Ask NH: 5 quick questions and we donate $2 to the charity of your choice | Hacker News Reader

Ask NH: 5 quick questions and we donate $2 to the charity of your choice

cloudblocks.wufoo.com

29 pointsksajadi20 comments

I like the charitable donation incentive, but I'm not so sure about the specific charities you chose. That money could do a lot more good per-dollar if it went to a more efficient charity, such as one of GiveWell's top-rated charities (currently the Against Malaria Foundation and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative). Would you consider adjusting the list to include them?

Yes. We chose the charities in the list based on the top five biggest charity categories: Children, Health, Animals, Environment and Poverty. We also tried to choose international charities that people know and trust.

If you have any suggestions about the charities please leave a comment here. We can't change the list of charities at this point as our survey provider would break the results already gathered. But we will figure out a way to cater for everyone's charity recommendations.

I always favour Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) whenever given the chance.

Bit late for me though... I already filled the survey in.

I'm not sure how to direct you to another source of charities but my personal experience with Oxfam: I donated $25 a couple of years back online, and every 3 months on the dot they physically post me, by international mail no less, a glossy, stuffed envelope of 'updates' with information that, after the advertising for themselves, would fit in a tweet.

Unfortunately, being one of the biggest charities means it's already well-funded, so additional donations won't do much good.

It's not really about catering to peoples' recommendations; if someone wants to give to the Expensive Treatments for Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies Fund, then fuck that. It's about achieving the most good.

It turns out that the amount of good that different charities do, per dollar, varies by orders of magnitude; and figuring out which charities are the best ones is a hard problem. Neither you, nor I, nor your visitors should be in the business of judging charities; that's better left to groups that do that research full-time, such as GiveWell.

> Unfortunately, being one of the biggest charities means it's already well-funded, so additional donations won't do much good.

Why do you say that? There are plenty of charities whose impact scales linearly donations. Just because some charity might be getting a billion dollars a year to feed children in Africa, doesn't mean that an extra 100 dollars won't feed MORE kids in Africa. The difference is that that charity has proven its method and probably has all of the infrastructure in place already. So it's often a safer bet that your money will be doing good.

Also, he didn't actually say they choose the biggest charities, he said they selected from each of the biggest charity categories.

If you add the EFF to you list of possible donation targets I'll gladly answer.

Why is this on HN? It certainly doesn't meet the criteria of being remotely interesting and there doesn't seem to be any intent to share the results back with the community.

Thanks for sharing your opinion.

It is in on HN as we are want to find out how startups provision their production environment and HN is full of great startup founders/workers and early adopters. We made sure it is clearly marked with Ask HN.

Also, as I mentioned in reply to another commenter, we are going to publish 3 pieces of information after this: results, post on our experience with HN surveys and also charity donations.

It certainly a good place for you to poll. I was wondering why it was upvoted to the front page.

Ask HN is generally used to engage in discussion and get answers in the forums, from which everyone benefits, not to post external, private surveys.

(BTW, you labeled it Ask NH, not Ask HN)

There's some special treatment of job ads for YC companies. Maybe this post was done using the same back door.

@ksajadi, I suppose we must trust your word regarding the donation. Will you share how much will be donated?

Thanks for participating. Yes. We are going to publish three pieces of information after this: survey results for anyone who's interested, a blog post about the process of getting a survey in front of early adopters and communities like HN and how successful it was and the details of donations to the charities.

Thank you everyone for taking part. We have reached the limit of the budget that we set out for this survey and now have stopped it so we can afford to pay the charities! We will post updates with the results.

So now it's closed, but I'm curious: what were the questions?

It was a short survey about how startups manage and provision their production servers.

You should have multiple possibilities for some of those answers

Thanks for feedback. Which ones you reckon?

Mobile + web app

Hosting types.

I use a mix of cloud for web hosting, PAAS for image and CDN stuff, and dedicated for databases.

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