There's Tracey Davis ambitious, there's Draco Malfoy ambitious, and then there's Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres ambitious. The top end of the scale isn't "start an new OS business", it's things like molecular nanotechnology or self-improving artificial intelligence.

Speaking of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, come on! It's been almost two months! I need my HPMoR fix ;-)

Am I the only person who feels a bit sorry/annoyed every time Eliezer gets harassed about updating HPMOR? It's his project, people, he'll update when he wants to.

It was supposed to be totally tongue in cheek with a wink and smiley to make it obvious. I suppose that is still harassment. I am sorry.

Ambition metrics seem to be evolving. Whatever happened to Victor Frankenstein ambitious? Or Craig Venter ambitious? Has creating new life become less ambitious since the story of DNA was unravelled? Turns out there are arithmetic problems that are harder that these things.

I have seen enough CRM projects fail to consider them to be hard. For all we know consumer-side CRM might be really hard. After all, it involves human relations. Perhaps someone will come along one day and prove that creating the perfect CRM system involves solving a really hard arithmetic problem.

Errr, sure.

> "start an new OS business"

Is that "an new" an error or some obscure rule I don't know about.

He wrote the "new" afterwards.

Was thinking 'delirious' but hyperbolic can be used too.

Also, the idea of centralized privacy preferences has been around since at least the late 90's, and was abandoned in 2006. See: http://www.w3.org/P3P/

The (online implementation of the) idea for social networking started in the 90s too by a little company called 6degrees that Amazon eventually bought. It too was abandoned along with the idea of social networking until friendster came along.

Yes. I was a member of 6degrees back in the day.

Of course, the very first sentence qualifies that statement with "... out of South Africa". I'm not an expert on South African companies, but I imagine that it's far less unlikely to be true with that qualification.

It feels ambitious in a different sense than for which I'd normally reserve the word. Ambitious in the sense that it will be a long journey. But it feels like the success or failure of this will be tied much more to whether the market is ready for it (and whether for security reasons it's feasible) than how much sweat goes into it.