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Comment by funkah | Hacker News Reader

I know what you mean, but the original Jonathan's Card thing made it seem like buying someone Starbucks was the height of charity when it's actually quite frivolous. At least this idea is real charity. It's still in the spirit of Jonathan's Card, but actually does some small amount of good for the world.

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We do have to remember that this was a social experiment that was not just about giving and receiving sbux coffee, but how a society reacts to a open public commons.

As I said before if the experiment was really only about the coffee and not about the money on the card then Jonathan should have his tweets update with units of coffee, not quantity of money.

The experiment was set up in a way where money was front and center and coffee was only secondary.Also, if it was just about coffee why have an API?

With this twist Jonathan's experiment is even more brilliant.

I expect there's still at least one twist left. rjett [0] and I [1] noticed two more interesting things:

1) Sam commented in the previous thread about buying food for homeless people from the card [2]

2) Sam's brother Daniel was one of the first to mention the possibility of the card being hacked [3]. His startup also funneled close to $600 into the card [4].

The whole thing started as a social experiment. Sam clearly considers what he's doing a part of the social experiment. I think it's still ongoing -- I fully expect another post, possibly later today or tomorrow morning, detailing the different reactions to his "I bought $25 of food for the homeless" comment and his "I bought $675 worth of food for starving kids in Africa" comment. Couple that with "me and my brother actually paid in what we took out" and we've got the makings of quite the experiment!

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2878622 [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2878196 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2857712 [3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2858120 [4] http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=danielodio -- $100, $49, $300, and mentions of a total of $85 on twitter

Indeed: @Socialize has paid $625 to @Jonathanscard to promote our SDK Speed Challenge. That's enough for an iPad, @sodio! http://besoci.al/q2I0QE http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2878875

That genuinely is great, but whose brothers are going to pay into @Jonathanscard to cover the results of posting the exploitative code used to fund iPads that enables laypeople to do so on their own?

That script isn't any more exploitative than one that `curl`s weather.com to make sure it isn't raining outside.

I think a lot of people read into Jonathan's Card as a charity thing, and reading the HN comments that always struck me as a gross misinterpretation of Jonathan's initial sentiment.

There is a difference between Random Acts of Kindness (Jonathan's card) vs charity.

I'm not sure why the difference is necessary in this case.

I think making someones day a brighter place can have a tremendous knock-on effect. If an anon gave me a cup of coffee, I might be more willing to donate to charity for anons benefit. To "pay it forward"( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward)

I don't find it convincing the suggestion that it would have been more effective to donate that coffee as charity, as opposed to promoting a society more amiable to giving.

No it didn’t. Where did you get a crazy idea like that?

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