[gojomo]

No, some projects can be too ambitious, including even recklessly or dangerously ambitious. But I'd rather hear that judgement from someone with a reputation for appropriate, successful ambitiousness, and with some supporting reasoning.

The grandparent comment comes from a pseudonym linked to no evaluable projects. It offers a costless, totally-generic pooh-poohing of a real project as "too ambitious". But that project is actually shipping code that works, with 126 contributors, many with a known history of contributions in related spheres.

Against that, the comment even uses an appeal to "HN standards"! As if, we should all be discounting this sort of stuff, on its face.

I'd prefer "HN standards" encourage such ambition, backed with code – not casually mock it with a ascii-smiley.

[urbit]

Again, the contributor list in github is WAY misleading, because it accidentally somehow pulled in all the contributors of the libraries we bundled (eg, libuv). We need to fix this, I think.

[gojomo]

Thanks for the clarification; I hadn't noticed that caveat earlier.

[pyre]

> But that project is actually shipping code that works

I get that this is more than just vaporware, but getting past the vaporware stage doesn't necessarily prove that something isn't too ambitious. When something is attempting to enact a paradigm shift, the final goal is adoption/usage, not just a working/functional product.

[gojomo]

You seem to be using "too ambitious" as a synonym for "unlikely to succeed". But that's something different.

"Too ambitious" implies someone shouldn't even be trying for this goal. That's a corrosive attitude, and I'd like it kept-in-check by a requirement that sources of such negativity show their reasoning/experience/work.

[urbit]

+1 - I can't emphasize this too strongly.

[grayclhn]

I read less negativity into the comment than that.