Good read, but the title didn't really prepare me for what it was actually about.

On clicking the link I thought I was going to be reading an FB'ers technical blog post about the dramas of dealing with massive facebook groups from their point of view.

I thought about that too, actually. I suppose it's a bit intentional, given the audience — I was definitely trying to be a bit tongue-in-cheek about "scaling".

Maybe I should append the subtitle "From 0 to Sam Altman and Beyond" to the submission title?

It would have been nice to have "HS Hackers" expanded/clarified somewhere in the beginning of the text - even as the introduction did mention "High schoolers" multiple times.

Definitely — thanks for the feedback. That's something that I struggled with in particular, because I wrote the post for a dual audience — both HS Hackers itself, as well as the wider hacker community.

I'm updating some of the language in the intro section to paint a more clear picture of what exactly HS Hackers is.

If anyone is interested in how those stats at the bottom were generated, it was with a Graph API tool I wrote for the job. I would be happy to clean it up and release it as open source if anyone else would find it valuable.

That would be neat! I had been thinking of doing a similar thing but I was always too lazy.

I'll try to package it up into something useful then! In short, my system basically was just a highly parallelized graph crawler in node.js, which dumped into mongo for easy queries and analysis. I'll try to make it a bit more agnostic though.

One issue is that the Graph API for groups is in fact broken — it's request pagination system yields an inconsistent (and incomplete) data set. We've reported the bug[0], but I've been seeing reports of this for months.

I've actually been beginning to suspect some sort of deliberate crippling, though I haven't exactly been able to work out a motive :)

[0] https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/518983258224814/

This was awesome to read. It's incredible to see such a growth in the hacker community- and a facebook community like this has definitely inspired a lot more creativity among young minds.

The extended pregnancy metaphor is confusing and off-putting.

Sorry you felt that way — definitely was not my intention to be off-putting. It just seemed like a natural way to partition the various stages of the story, especially given that the group was started 9 months ago.

It's amazing to think how many people this group has come to influence (including myself) over these past months.

This is really good. Will take note.

C is best

what's up iofel