Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta
(engineering.fb.com)214 points by Maro 2 days ago
214 points by Maro 2 days ago
Is it? It seems like 90% of what Netflix is (from a technical PoV), is a CDN + video playback. There's a lot more value in the content library they've negotiated and the business agreements with ISPs than there is in the software stack.
Apologies if this response is delayed, 6 posts today is "too fast."
Tanya Rai - Introducing Bento: Jupyter Notebooks @ Facebook | JupyterCon 2020 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3UfVX4_PD4
The original "Block Editor" (that Jupyter modeled itself after) is the one that's now called "Quanta", and has been around for decades in various forms and incantations:
https://github.com/Clay-Ferguson/quantizr
I'm thinking that Jupyter might still not be "Tree Based" but that would be a heck of a leap in capability if they "fix" that.
I always thought Jupyter was based on other notebook-style interfaces like Mathematica or Maple.
I meant the "block editor" aspect, like how individual chunks of text and images can be independently selected and moved around or even shared with their own URL.
I've long believed some system like that could and should some day replace even HTML and the web, and that it'll only happen if the Semantic Web ever takes off in a big way where chunks of stuff are "typed" (like a Type-Safe Web). Even Tim Berners Lee has been dreaming of this for decades, but the world is still stuck in HTML-land for the foreseeable future.
Yes, but it's closer to Sage (browser and Python based).
I don't know what quantadev is thinking of, but Quanta seems totally different and not a programming notebook at all. Its README also claims "Quanta is a new kind of platform with a new kind of architecture", while quantadev claims it "has been around for decades".
Show HN from 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38971966
Having used both Bento and later Colaboratory, a few years ago, I think I liked the latter a lot more. Google's internal tools are usually much more polished and better-designed, perhaps because they've been around for much longer.
Can this be downloaded somewhere?
Couldn't find any link in the open source site: https://opensource.fb.com/ nor the ELI5: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2021/09/20/eli5-be...
TBH the value of bento over other notebook offerings was almost entirely how well it plays with the rest of the data and infra stack within facebook. It was super easy to go from raw data (entire DE and DI orgs responsible for ETL and cluster maintenance) to a cleaned up table (usually built by DEs) to an ad hoc table to support a specific use-case that could then be accessed via bento, analyzed, and then published / shared to anyone in the company.
"Oh that's cool.", "It'd be interesting to work on problems like that.", "That's a neat solution"
If anyone's on the fence about applying, that could be enough to nudge them in the direction. If anyone's worked in similar areas, could be worth applying and looking at the team, etc.
Probably not. It's written in Hack, and heavily tied to internal frameworks, so it'll be practically impossible to extract into a standalone package, unless they do a "clean room" implementation (like they did for Sapling UI https://sapling-scm.com/docs/addons/isl/).
But it has some cool features that notebook developers can take inspiration from.
A bit off-topic, but my problem with any notebook type of tool (ie you create a document that mixes code, the output of that code, and text/media) is that they always feel like they're meant to be these quick, off the cuff ways to present data. But when I try to use them they just feel awkward and slow. (I tried doing a jupyter notebook with the vscode plugin, and while everything was very polished, it feld like I was ponderously coding in Word or something. The same was true for R-notebooks in rstudio. Maybe it's a better experience if you have a decently fast laptop)
I'm assuming you've seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U&t=61s? I know I found it far more amusing than I should have when it was released.
I will confess that I found Mathematica kind of neat back in the day. I never got as good with it as peers did. I'm curious if that would be different for me today.
That video cannot be seen without watching Jeremy Howard's rebuttal: I Like Notebooks. I also believe this was the video that got him kicked out of a conference(?) because it was too confrontational? Which was just ugly for a guy who clearly loves being an educator.
I have the exact opposite experience — VS Code notebooks are much snappier and are possibly the best Jupyter implementations I’ve ever used (better and more responsive than vanilla Jupyter or Jupyter labs).
VS code notebooks also support LSPs with refactoring, typing etc. Black is supported. Step by step debugging is supported. Venv is built in.
There are so many conveniennces in VS Code that whenever I have to use Jupyter Lab I feel a lot of stuff is missing.
I agree with you that the VSCode experience feels superior. It integrates a lot of the other various IDE widgets into the notebook experience. Code formatting, variable definitions, spell checker, non-garbage tier code hints, etc. The little timer noting the time it takes to run a cell alone is a huge boon.
My only complaint is how white space heavy the VSCode layout is by default. Probably can be customized, but I have never dug into it.
Hitting Escape in normal mode takes you out of editing the cell and into "notebook manipulation mode" instead. This is so counter to the way Vim normally works - Esc should leave you in normal mode no matter where you started - that I found it almost unusable until I realised I could just remap that binding. I made it Shift-Esc and am very happy with it now.
marimo has a playground to run notebooks via WebAssembly - similar to Bento - without having to deploy yourself: https://marimo.app/
The internal tools at Meta are incredible tbh. There’s an ecosystem of well-designed internal tools that talk to each other. That was my favorite part of working there.
Polar opposite of my experience. To achieve the technical equivalent of changing a lightbulb, spend the entire day wrangling a dozen tools which are broken in different ways, maintained by teams that no longer exist or have completely rolled over, only to arrive at the finish line and discover we don't use those lightbulbs anymore. Move things and break fast.
Yeah 100%. I found it immensely frustrating to be using tools with no community (except internally), so-so documentation, and features that were clearly broken in a way that would be unacceptable for a regular consumer product. If you have a question or error not covered by an internal search or documentation, good luck, you'll need it. Literally part of the reason I left the company.
Well, you're supposed to read the code and figure it out. And if you can't, you're not good enough an engineer. According to people at Meta.
Agreed. I often get my work done using open source build instructions and tools and then when everything works I port it to internal infra. Other people are the opposite though, which for open source based code bases has a nasty side effect of the work having no upstream able tests!
But you're both talking about different things. The tools are both often left in disuse, lacking documentation, etc. But they also have a really tight integration with each other that allows for unparalleled visibility and ability over enormous systems with many moving parts.
It's been awhile, but I recall fighting with the massive checkout sizes to do anything of consequence with the internal tooling causing the vms to run out of disk space and corrupt my work. I got very used to rsyncing to my laptop every few minutes and rebuilding the vm multiple times per day. Totally frustrating and pointless waste of time.
Large checkouts is a solved problem now https://github.com/facebook/sapling/blob/main/eden/fs/docs/O...
My opinion: Many Meta tools and processes seem like they were created by former Googlers that sought to recreate something they previously had at Google, during the Google->FB Exodus, but also changed aspects of the tool that were annoying or diverged from their needs. This is not a bad thing.
Since Bento doesn't appear to be usable by the public, aparallel version of this that people can get a feel for cross-tool integration would be Google's Colaboratory / Colab notebooks (https://colab.research.google.com/) that have many baked-in integrations driven by actual internal use (i.e. dogfooding).
As someone from both, I confirm/support your opinion 100%.
I agree, the paid for Pro version of Colab just seems to have the features I need. I often use it because it simply saves me time and hassles.
You and I must be working in different areas.
For any kind of general Python/C++ work, its a _massive_ pain.
The integrated debugger rarely works, and its a 30 minute recompile to figure that out. The documentation for actually being efficient in build/run/test is basically "ask the old guy in the corner". You'd best hope they know and are willing to share.
The code search is great! The downside is that nobody bothers to document stuff, so thats all you've got. (comments/docstrings are for weaklings apparently)
You want to use a common third party library? You'd best hope its already ingested, otherwise you're going to be spending the next few days trying to get that into the codebase. (yes there are auto tools, no they don't always work.) Also, you're now on the hook to do security upgrades.
One of the crazier things a L4 meta colleague of mine told me, that I still don’t believe entirely, is that meta pretty much has their own fork of everything, even tools like git. is this true?
Facebook actually doesn't use git, they use mercurial (https://graphite.dev/blog/why-facebook-doesnt-use-git).
That decision is also illustrative of why they end up forking most things - Facebook's usage patterns at the far extreme end for almost any tool, and things thats are non-issues with fewer engineers or a smaller codebase become complete blockers.
Yes when I used to talk about this to interviewees, I described that every tool people commonly use is somewhere on the Big-O curves for scaling. Most of the time we don't really care if a tool is O(n) or O(10 n) or whatever.
At Meta, N tends to be hundreds of billions to hundreds of trillions.
So your algorithm REALLY matters. And git has a Big-O that is worse than Mercurial, so we had to switch.
Yep. Zeus is a fork of Zookeeper, Hack is a fork of PHP, etc. It's usually needed to make it work with the internal environment.
The few things that don't have forks are usually the open source projects like React or PyTorch, but even those have some custom features added to make it work with FB internals.
Few companies experienced the explosive growth fb did, though many will claim to have done so. Hack made the existing codebase of php scale to insane levels while reaching escape velocity for the overall company to even attempt to transition away or shrink the php codebase, as i recall (i was an SRE, not a dev)
zeus likewise.
Meta doesn't use git. It uses mercurial. It does fork it because they have a huge monorepo. They created a concept of stacked commits which is a way of not having branches. Each commit is in a stack and then merged into master. Lots of things built for scaling.
Left pad was from the creator pulling the code from the public source forge, not from a destructive code change.
I assume all of the big tech companies host internal mirrors of every single code dependency + tooling. Otherwise they could not guarantee that they can build all of their code.
Meta tools are best in class when the requirement is scale. Or that the external tools haven't matured yet
A friend of mine is doing his PHD while being an intern at Meta. He does not share your excitement... at all. To summarize his complaints: a framework written a long while ago with design flaws that were cast in stone, that requires exorbitant effort to accomplish simple things (under the pretense of global integration that usually isn't needed, but even if was needed, would still not work).
How long has he been interning? Is it long enough for him to have learned how long the timescale big-tech roadmaps operate on? If he wants a feature, he better write it himself (if his PR doesn't conflict with an upcoming rewrite, coming "soon"), or lobby to get it slotted for the second quarter of 2026.
He started right about the time COVID started, so... about four years now, I think. I'm not sure if those were contiguous though.
I'm not sure what your idea about PRs and features has to do with the above... he's not there to work on the internal infra framework. He's there for ML stuff. Unfortunately, the road to the later goes through the former, but he's not really a kind of programmer who'd deal with Facebook's infrastructure and plumbing.
The point is, it's inconvenient. Is it inconvenient because Facebook works on a five-year plan basis or whatever other reason they have for it doesn't really matter. It's just not good.
I also have no problems admitting that all big companies (two in total, one being Google) I worked for so far had bad internal tools. I don't imagine Facebook is anything special in this respect. I just don't feel like it's necessary to justify it in any way. It's just a fact of life: large companies have a tendency to produce bad internal tools (but small often have none whatsoever!) It's a water is wet kind of thing...
> I'm not sure what your idea about PRs and features has to do with the above... he's not there to work on the internal infra framework.
My idea is if he's not making the monorepo codebase changes himself, he's going to have to wait for an awfully long time for any non-trivial improvements he'd like because the responsible teams have different priorities sketched out for next calendar year. It's a function of organization size, unless you have the support of someone very high up on the org chart, ICs can't unilaterally adjust another teams priorities.
> A friend of mine is doing his PHD while being an intern at Meta
I interned thrice as phd student at FB. your friend isn't entirely wrong but also just doesn't have enough experience to judge. all enormous companies are like this. FB is far and away better than almost all such companies (probably only with the exception of Google/Netflix).
Agreed. I'm reading some complaints in the thread about being told to "just read the source code" for internal tools at Meta. When I worked at Apple we didn't even get the source code!
I don't see why saying that Facebook's tools are bad should be invalidated by saying that Google's or others' tools are bad too. Google being bad doesn't vindicate or improve Facebook tools. There's no need for perspective: if it doesn't work well for what's it designed to do, then that's all there is to it.
> Google's or others' tools are bad too
lol bruh read my response again - FB's and Google's and Amazon's tool are lightyears ahead of #ARBITRARY_F100_COMPANY. you haven't a clue what "bad" means if you've never worked in a place that has > 1000 engineers.
Uuuh can you tell a bit more about wasabi, the Python LSP? Saw a post years ago and been eager to see whether it’d be open sourced (or why it wouldn’t).
we are building libro notebook, you can try on https://github.com/difizen/libro
I kind of love Meta for all the seemingly unnecessary internal stuff they do. They have so many projects that are absolutely not critical for them, maybe not even net positive, but they spend who knows how many hours building and maintaining them.