Ask HN: Who needs holiday help? (Follow up thread)

by atdrummond on 12/20/2023, 7:06:37 AM with 9 comments
Hi all, I wanted to make sure that, ahead of Christmas and New Years, that everyone on HN who needs help (whether that’s affording a Christmas Day dinner or with longer term needs) is able to communicate such. I will be inaccessible from the 27th of December onwards for ten days, so I want to make sure I’m able to fulfill all/the majority of requests prior to then.

Thanks to our previous thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38492378) I was able to distribute nearly $30,000 in support to those who needed it.

Unfortunately, this year the requests were not only far more numerous than in year’s past but also much more significant in the amounts asked. Given this, I kindly request that if you’re asking for support, that you do two things:

1. Make sure that the request is necessary. We had some asks for things like children’s college funds for kids who are 1-2 years old. While this is a worthy investment, it is somewhat outside the scope of this particular support programme.

2. Keep your request to $1,000 or less. Last year, the vast majority of funding requests were under $100. This year, a good 25%+ of all requests were over $1000 and we had a decent number (2-3%) over $10,000. While I did my best to finance the larger requests, please remember that I can have a greater impact the larger the number of people I can support. This cap might be overridden in truly extenuating circumstances but I want to encourage people to ask for what they truly need.

Finally, please post in this thread once your support request has been filled. I want to avoid the otherwise-inevitable double funding that seems to happen when fulfillments are not noted.

Once again, thank you to this wonderful community for all you’ve done for me and others. I truly hope that this is a small way in which I can begin to repay my karmic debt.

- alexander

EDIT: if you DID not receive a response from me (I got well over 300 emails) please send me a NEW email with your request.

please include:

1. total needed 2. name + address 3. how to pay (preferred methods are, in order of preference, cashapp, bank transfer (wise, wire, ACH, etc), PayPal, crypto)

  • by herpdyderp on 12/20/2023, 6:36:27 PM

    From your original post:

    > this is not a request for donations. Last year and this year I am content to finance this operation myself (although a number of people did step up and offer additional support)

    I don’t have colossal amounts of money to contribute but I’d love to be able to contribute something and I’m sure many others would as well, increasing the possible scope of assistance. I understand if the complexity of setting up general contributions is not worth the hassle though, or if it simply doesn’t align with your goals here.

  • by catharsisatlast on 12/29/2023, 6:51:57 PM

    I have been working with a generous person who reached out to me based on my last post from earlier this month. They've been tremendously helpful, and I'm not in need of assistance otherwise. My thanks.

  • by Alosra on 12/20/2023, 7:22:00 PM

    What you are doing is inspiring, I'm currently a student with not so much money but doing somthing like this is definitely on my list when I can afford it. Thanks for doing it and also the Idea. I'm sure, as you know, that there are many who are grateful.

  • by switchupcb on 12/21/2023, 8:06:43 PM

    I received the amount I asked for a food budget this month ($300).

    Thank you so much!

    More updates on my situation coming soon.

  • by tristanc on 12/20/2023, 6:59:32 PM

    Hi atdrummond!

    I'm sorry I missed your earlier thread I had no idea you were doing and was a little stumped but I think you are an amazing person for doing this.

    I'm writing because I think I could use your help!

    I'm a recent graduate from University in France (Sorbonne University) with a degree in CS. I recently moved back to the states to my parent's house to look for a job but it's been difficult to get an offer.

    I'm passionate about CS and have been working on personal projects while waiting to land an interview. Most recently I've been working on projects like creating novel interfaces for exploring music by analyzing audio with a neural net and plotting in 3D according to genre classification.

    (demos from my project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UyjFeLjGJs&list=PLvzGE7O7Di... )

    I've been having a great time developing this and my friends are all encouraging but it's been difficult to convince a company to hire me or a way to monetize this.

    Furthermore, I only have access to an old family computer from 2013 so have been limited to doing audio processing and hosting on cpu.

    I would be eternally grateful and appreciative if you would do me the favor of helping finance a PC with reasonable specs such as a GPU and proper storage capacity (stuck on a 512GB SSD right now...) to help me develop my projects further!

    I would only ask for ~$800 and I could finance the rest but this would be a huge huge huge help!

    I still can't believe someone would be so generous as you but I know HN is full of thoughtful people so I'd love to discuss!

    I'm not sure which transfer method is best yet but I have a bank account in the US and paypal so I'm sure we could make something work.

    Thank you so much!!!! My name is Tristan btw (: I am located in virginia and my email is tristancharpentier@protonmail.com

  • by pants2 on 12/20/2023, 7:14:12 PM

    You're a good person, Mr. Alexander!

  • by primemind on 12/20/2023, 6:45:02 PM

    This is very cool thanks for doing this!