tcpekinon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice”
Here they are - they're definitely irreverent, but I find myself strongly agreeing with everything he says. link link to this video
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#jupyternotebook#joelgrus#datascience
I don't like notebooks.- Joel Grus (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence)
O'Reilly
202K subscribers • 24 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 6 people: 6 on Hacker News.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2018 to 2024.
- Presented by Joel Grus, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
- May be out of date. Uploaded 8 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
120K views8 years ago6 recommendations
Tools and practiceAI and machine learningPythonTestingDeveloper productivity
Joel Grus explains his criticisms of Jupyter notebooks, focusing on hidden state, reproducibility issues, testing difficulties, and pedagogical drawbacks.
I have been using and teaching Python for many years. I wrote a best-selling book about learning data science. And here’s my confession: I don’t like notebooks. (There are dozens of us!) I’ll explain why I find notebooks difficult, show how they frustrate my preferred pedagogy, demonstrate how I prefer to work, and discuss what Jupyter could do to win me over. Subscribe to O'Reilly on YouTube: goo.gl/n3QSYi Follow O'Reilly on: Twitter: twitter.com/oreillymedia Facebook: facebook.com/OReilly Instagram: instagram.com/oreillymedia LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company-beta/8459/Why it's here
6 people recommend thisWhat people say. Widely recommended as the definitive critique of Jupyter notebooks and their impact on software engineering practices.
kevsimon Hacker News • Recommends
On “How to separate your data from your code”
Jupyter notebooks are really abysmal when it comes to best engineering practices. There's an amazing talk called "I don't like notebooks" by Joel Grus at last years JupyterCon 0. I highly recommend it. 0 link to this video
toshon Hacker News • Recommends
On “I Violated a Code of Conduct”
If you haven't yet: I think both talks are very worth watching: I don't like notebooks ( link to this video ) by Joel Grus I like notebooks ( link ) by Jeremy Howard notebooks are a very interesting medium and they have both shortcomings as well as things they are great at and neither were totally obvious to me.
softwaredougon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: How do you run long computations without interruption?”
Get extensive code out of notebooks into testable libraries. Confirm it works before running a big computation. We try to keep our notebooks slim and factor anything complex into a Python library. We can experiment with this libraries implementation, write unit tests on smaller data sets to confirm it works, before doing a bigger experiment. We can also deploy the library to prod and ensure users get the exact same thing we experimented with. I would recommend the talk “I don’t like notebooks” link to this video (There’s also the alternative nbdev that creates a full software engineering and experimentation setup in 100% notebooks. Not something I particularly like, but it might be another option.)
carreauon Hacker News • Recommends
On “IPython 8.0”
…her folks at link that might be more aware, you can also ask on discourse.jupyter.org, I'm pretty sure you can find threads on those issues. I think on the Jupyter side we could do a better job curating and exposing many tools to help with that, but there are just so many hours in the day... I also recommend I don't like notebook from Joel Grus, link to this video it's a really funny talk, a lot of the points are IMHO invalid as Joel is misinformed on how things can be configured, but still a great watch.…
lelandbateyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code”
…t and without re-computing everything that depends on what you just edited. Behavior like this makes it super hard to track the actual state, and super easy to lose track of how things are how they are. That's pretty terrible! The parent article links this great talk that goes into more detail than the parent post and is much easier to understand: link to this video…
u/prooofbyinductionin r/dataengineering • Mentions
notebooks: do you love them or do you hate them?
i recently stumbled on this talk from a few years ago by joel grus on why notebooks suck. there's been a lot of innovation in the space since (with products like databricks, deepnote, hex, etc.), but a lot of the fundamental flaws of notebooks still exist.
i originally asked this in r/datascience, but am curious to hear how this audience differs in their opinions of notebooks. curious to hear any perspectives.
u/imahappycamperin r/scala • Mentions
On “Compiling/testing Jupyter notebook code with sbt?”
In general you're better off using a better tool for hosting your visualisations, for this very reason (and more). Something like dash and plotly works well since you can prototype in a notebook then move them to dash. Otherwise you can embed your visualisations in a small webservice (we used flask and django in a previous job, others here might have recommendations for the scalaverse).
If you're determined to stick with notebooks, netflix has a tool called papermill that can help with notebook orchestration, but you're going to cause yourself more heartbreak in the long run than switching out to a more testable solution now.
EForEndeavouron Hacker News • Mentions
On “Xkcd-Style Plots in Matplotlib (2012)”
You're not the only one. Here are slides from a talk that Joel Grus gave at JupyterCon 2018 titled "I hate Jupyter Notebooks": link Video of talk: link to this video
3JPLWon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Pluto.jl – a reactive, lightweight, simple notebook”
It completely fixes a huge number of the gripes in the JupyterCon talk I don't like notebooks by Joel Grus. The primary complaint there is that notebooks have a disconnect between the state of the program and the display of the cells. By using a completely reactive mode the state is no longer hidden. It's more akin to a spreadsheet than a notebook. A number of other complaints are completely circumvented by using a file format that's simply a pure Julia file with clever comments. Video: link to this video Slides: link Previous discussion: link
kenwardon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Nbterm: Jupyter Notebooks in the Terminal”
I've been using the VSCode Insider's release as well and have been loving it and the new native notebook features for all the reasons you've listed already. That's an interesting solution. I believe this is similar to what Joel Grus does 0, except %s/jupyter/ipython. 0 link to this video
gravypodon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems (2019)”
I'm wondering what your opinion is of this talk: link to this video It has some comments about why good software engineering leads to good software, how good software engineering is hard right now because there's a lot of bad examples which cause people to make more bad code, and some suggestions on how things could be done.
epistasison Hacker News • Mentions
On “The Economist's excess deaths model”
…mely frustrating. Or in the last 5-10 years, with design trends preferring spare layouts with lots of empty space, it was super hard to get information dense designs into production, because they were so averse to the idea that people may need information density for some things. I'm also reminded of this video about the deficiencies of notebooks: link to this video Yes, there are huge deficiencies to notebooks. But using them is an entirely different task than the type of code that one would write in an IDE, for code that gets put into a library and will be run by others. I have two work modes: 1) IDE (actually Emacs) where I write tests and the code is…
taericon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta”
I'm assuming you've seen link to this video ? 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.
tillahoffmannon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Show HN: Localscope–Limit scope of Python functions for reproducible execution”
Yes, Jupyter notebooks are flawed (there's a great talk at link to this video ). But they are also very convenient for scrappy work and exploratory data analysis.