Why conceal the donate link behind a link shortener? And on yet another creepy surveillance related story. I can't be the only one that sees the irony here.
This way, you can still have your (unnecessary) click tracking while still giving the reader choice. I think you used a link shortener only to track clicks, since there is no 140 character limit here on HN. Ask yourself if this practice is really necessary.
Sorry - The shortened link was copied from his Facebook post. I thought it appeared sketchy but when I tried to expand it and paste it into HN it got corrupted (just like in your post). I was too lazy to figure a workaround. Sorry.
TinyURL allows previewing of links by adding 'preview' as a subdomain, like so: http://preview.tinyurl.com/m65n4ko
Now we can see where your link really takes us, to a PayPal donate page: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s- xclick&hosted_button_id=7BCR4A5W9PNN4
This way, you can still have your (unnecessary) click tracking while still giving the reader choice. I think you used a link shortener only to track clicks, since there is no 140 character limit here on HN. Ask yourself if this practice is really necessary.