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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

You could spin up a large number of ArchiveTeam warrior images

Are they a 501(c)(3)? If the OP's marginal combined tax rate is, say 50%, then donating $8k in credits would be like $4k in their pocket.

EDIT: Of course OP should talk to an accountant first. . . .

The Internet Archive is indeed a 501(c)3, and this is a great idea. It also fits very well with the request in the PS.

The Internet Archive is a different entity than ArchiveTeam. I'm skeptical that running AT instances (which scrape websites into archives which then get hosted by IA) counts as a donation towards the IA.

From archiveteam.org:

    Archive Team is in no way affiliated with the fine folks at ARCHIVE.ORG

Granted, but you could contact archive.org and ask how $8k of AWK credit could be donated and used productively. I'm certain they'd have a valuable use for it.

id rather spent my time writing infinitely nested while loops then talk to my accountant about one more topic

Or buy some 3-year reserved instances and run the iabak scripts http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/g...

Actually I don't remember how paying for storage works with reserved instances... if you're going to get stuck with a recurring bill that you can't pay with the credits, then never mind.

If I get this correctly, this would help make a backup of archive.org. It would download a big amount of data and then store it for... one month, until the instances expire? That seems rather wasteful of bandwidth and effort, or am I missing the point?

That's a separate AT project. The Warrior downloads data from various websites (usually ones that look like they're about to go down) and uploads the data to a central AT server. It's distributed to get around rate-limiting and banning. Data is not stored long-term on the Warrior.

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