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Comment by jath | Hacker News Reader

I presume one reason could be at 40 you dont make the mistakes you made at 20. I was 20 once and when i built a product i tried to load it with features/options. Now at 30 i make things as simple as possible. I don’t discuss which DB to use. I straight away use SQL. I don’t discuss scaling issues. I dont bother about 80% of the issues i used to discuss when i was 20. I’m better of now.

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You are right. The average entrepreneur could be 16 but the average successful will be around 40. I did the same mistake as you, adding as many features as possible so that users can use whatever they like. Now I think of it like adding as many wheels as possible to a car so that users can use whatever wheels they like.

Keep things as simple and single functionality as possible. If you can't explain your startup in one sentence, it's doing too much

Unfortunately, even some in their forties haven’t learned it yet.

I had a client around 2008-2009 (he was around 40 at the time and successfully launched several companies) who wanted a website/web app which basically was doing crowdfunding and videoconferencing (plus shared board and documents)

Yeah, I said basically and here we are getting a lot of functionality. I spare you the rest.

Needless to say after 2 years and a half of discussion and meetings and « what about we add that functionality ? », money ran dry and the whole thing never launched.

So he learnt at 42 rather than at 40! ;)

Yeah, one thing experience teaches you is what matters and what doesn't. I still struggle with that, though.

Agreed. You realize that making money is the hard part so there's no need to do a ton of thinking into technical decisions until it becomes "a good problem" to have.

These days I might have an idea for a feature in my head and pitch it to people as if it exists to gauge interest. If it seems like it's a clear winner I build it into my product. If not, I'm not writing any code.

    I don’t discuss which DB to use. I straight away use SQL.

That is a language though, not a DB.

Did you really have to be that guy ? What he meant basically is using a relational database. Please refer to the HN guidelines before commenting. It strongly encourages to have comments that add value to the discussion.

I agree with TekMol that it's an important point. Nowadays we have new types of SQL databases emerging. Some examples:

TiDB (distributed)

CockroachDB (distributed)

Crate (uses SQL but isn't even relational)

They all use SQL.

Picking between these and more established SQL databases is worthy of discussion.

Heck, based on what I see on Hacker News, picking between the established ones generates a lot of discussion, usually with people preferring Postgres over MySQL, etc.

Then there's SQLite, which is completely different again.

OP probably has a favourite database as a go-to regardless of the application, but for some projects SQLite might be a better fit than the others, for example. That would warrant discussion.

In conclusion, I believe you were too harsh to TekMol.

Edit: Fix autocorrect fails and add clarity.

one of the community practices here is that you should take the most charitable interpretation of what is written. This precludes nitpicking. It's clear that the OP was referring to "I just use SQL" in terms of picking the most mature/standard database approach (relational databases) instead of getting caught up in the quagmire of niche and specialist database schemas.

That might not be so obvious to someone who isn't familiar with SQL databases. To those people, the "nitpick" added clarity.

In the .NET / Microsoft world "SQL" has been synonymous with "Microsoft SQL Server" for years. GP could just be from that background.

Yup and if he was using PHP it'd almost certainly be MySQL. Your grizzled old Perl types would probably go with postgreSQL as an easy assumption

I assumed he meant MySQL, but now that you bring it up I wonder what other people thought he meant?

I read it as one of MySQL/MariaDB/PostgresQL/MSSQL. AFAIK they're the canonical implementations now. Sqlite is too but that's embedded, so it's targeting a different use case.

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