After living in Finland a few years we got a dog, so I was often holding a big bone in my hand and saying the Finnish word for it, "luu". Something felt so correct and ancient about it, like luu is - and could only ever have been - the word that means the concept of a bone. I looked it up and luu is Proto-Finno-Ugric, and one of the oldest words to stick around in the Finnish language.
I have great respect for that first person to shake mammoth bone in another person's face saying "luu". They nailed it.
Like the other commenter I also thought the book was a dud and had nothing going on. But the "a teacher is what I see" finally clicked that series' large pictures were designed to communicate at distance. When my 8 month old wants to grab everything and not settle down to sleep, I can read her that book while she's in the crib and the calming cadence does its work. Will be fun to see her read it like your kids one day.
After a sudden influx of traffic years back, HN had an Erlang Day where the only thing upvoted was articles about Erlang. I can't tell you if it helped HN get better or not, because it caused me to come back after seeing how much the community cared about the quality of the site. Perhaps it's time to make HN proud of its boringness again?
We might as well turn this into constructive dialog - does anyone have any thoughts on how to monetize niche online media? Our events went well, but didn't scale.
I don't know if they were predicting a HN size load in this stage of their development. When I interviewed Kaspar for this article he said that they're looking for funding this fall to help scale, which looks like a good idea. I found the service interesting though, well worth a bookmark!
I agree completely, but would also point out that a regional startup blog may put you in front of potential investors and partners if you're far away from Silicon Valley.
I have great respect for that first person to shake mammoth bone in another person's face saying "luu". They nailed it.