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Comment by intsunny | Hacker News Reader

..... never underestimate people's desperation/shamelessness for free t-shirts.

8-9 years ago, at DigitalOcean's first SXSW booth, we were giving out free t-shirts that had DO's Sammy shark logo, and Linux's Tux penguin logo. The catch was people had to name the penguin on the t-shirt. The vast majority could not name Tux, and pled to get the t-shirt anyways.

It was a very surreal experience.

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This is what I don't understand, though. If you only want to meet the requirements with low quality PRs, you've always been able to achieve that with your own public repository.

I've mostly used Hacktoberfest as an annual opportunity to learn some new tech that I've read about but haven't yet had a chance to try. I start a new public repo and work through their tutorial doing PRs to commit chunks for each major section etc.

Open source. No spam for anyone. I learn something. Free shirt.

Practicing PR hygiene on your own repo if it's something you're not already familiar with is also a benefit.

I think your question was a pretty low barrier to winning, but I guess not. That's about when SXSW became more of a circus, filled with lots of "fake it 'till you make it" types. I would overhear people practicing their pitches (usually in an elevator!) and they were all different combinations of the same phrases that were trendy that year: "We offer crowdsourced coupons via influencers to create brand awareness.." "We work with influencers in offering coupons, to crowdsource brand awareness.."

Tux is very much a obscure reference except in tech bubbles

I think that's mostly true, but I've been surprised by non-tech people pointing out and recognizing Tux on various things of my over the years since college (a T-shirt, my background on my laptop at one time, etc.). I think there's a certain segment of the population that will see an adorable penguin mascot, like it, and then look up what it is.

hot take: SXSW is pretty much a tech bubble by definition.

“Free” makes people do weird things.

Folks will stand in line for about an hour for a free sub sandwich that costs ~$5.

People will choose free stuff over cheap stuff all the time. Study below has an experiment (experiment 2). They first offered people either a Hershey's kiss for 1ct or a Lindt truffle for 15ct. The majority took the truffle. Then they decreased the prices to 0ct and 14ct respectively, so the same price difference. The Hershey's kisses suddenly sold better than the truffle

https://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/zero.pdf

I dont know if it is mentioned in the paper, but one important thing is the friction of paying, even if it is 1 cent. It works the other way around too, sometimes people pay to avoid more friction in the future (like in those pay and you will get no ads, priority in the queue, etc, kind of services)

Free food just tastes better.

Amazing. I somehow thaught that Tux name was a common knowledge - even my kids know it :)

Just found out now, no shirt for me

Same. I thought he was named, “Nice Linus,” or something.

"good penguin, angry man" is the new "good cop, bad cop"

> The vast majority could not name Tux

This is why the year of the Linux desktop is never happening. People outside the echo chamber don’t realize how tiny it is.

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