Scaling the HS Hackers Facebook Group | Hacker News Reader

Scaling the HS Hackers Facebook Group

medium.com

34 pointsaroman14 comments

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

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