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Responding to three good comments - on differentiation in business, and recharging from half-work

Has it only been a few months since we started? It feels like much longer, there's already a strong and vibrant and insightful group of people communicating here at SebastianMarshall.com - I'm really pleased and happy to have a good crew reading, commenting, emailing me, getting into good discussions and thinking.

A tricky thing for most people building a website is to nail down these questions - "Who is this website for? What do I want to do with this?"

It's easy for me. The site is for people like me who wish to do a lot of important things, to communicate, to think more clearly, to become prolific, to grow in strength and virtue. I create on the topics that are important to doing important things.

The people who this resonates with are always welcome to come visit and gain in strength and knowledge here, to build, to hopefully be inspired, to communicate, to do good things. The people who the site appeals to are its audience, and I won't be trying to persuade anyone to join us who these topics do not appeal to at the current stage in their life.

I've got a number of good comments I'd like to share. This was the second half of a comment from yesterday's post, me wondering about technology.

Party on, Offer HN, Party on

Well, a very cool trend is happening at Hacker News - people are posting "Offer HN" threads offering advice and help. The first one seems to be "Will Work for Karma" by todayiamme, which kicked the whole thing off. My favorite is "Tax Help for Startup Entrepreneurs" because there's a lot of insight and analysis just in the thread itself. I like learning about law, but it's damn expensive to learn about either in time or money. That said, learning law can save you a lot of money when you write a contract correctly or when you have a company buyback shares instead of purchasing them yourself when buying a partner in a two person partnership out.

After a bunch of "Offer HN" threads started kicking up, there were two discussion topics, both by guys I respect. "Please stop offering your services" and "Please keep offering your services" by Swombat and Jacques. There seems to be a few themes going on:

1. Some people think this is really cool and nice of people. 2. Some people are skeptical of the intentions of people doing this. 3. Some people don't want to see HN get bogged down/clogged up by this.

Let's cover those in reverse order.

First, if it gets out of control and you want to see news without offers, Paul Graham implemented http://news.ycombinator.com/offerless - no offers there. So that solves that problem.