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Comment by sizediterable | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that they published the more recent paper discussed in part 2 [0] since, IIRC, TAO has supported atomic transactions since at least when I was there a few years ago, but better late than never I suppose. I wonder if that means there's still hope that someone at the company will write a blog post about frameworks like:

  - EntSchema/EntPattern
  - EntQL
  - EntAction
  - PrivacyPolicy
  - Ent Deletion framework
  - Ent consistency checkers/fixers (I forget the name of the framework/tool)

It's sad to think that people's only glimpse into these tools is through https://entgo.io which is a really crude approximation of the real thing due to Go's lack of generics and expressiveness. Imagine if such amazing tools could be used at actually ethical companies.

[0] https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/10/23/ramp-tao-layering-ato...

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There’s now a paper on the deletion framework at least. [1] is a high level summary that links to the paper.

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2020/08/12/security/delf/

Oh cool, I didn't know about this. I guess they tend to publish more infrastructure-oriented papers, which is understandable, but I wish there was more in general about the developer APIs that they enable and how they benefit productivity from a product engineer's point of view.

Lead author on the deletion paper here. Thanks for the feedback! I agree it would be cool to talk about the Ent APIs some more; they have a lot of obvious and less-obvious benefits. (For example, we are only able to add deletion constraints to Ents as described in the paper because the Ent specification language is expressive enough to do it.)

Technically those are unrelated to TAO. Those are all part of layers that sit on top of TAO. The TAO part is optional too. For example, you can put the Ent data access layer on top of MySQL directly.

Right, I wasn't trying to imply a relationship. I only meant to say that if they're willing to write about old news for one piece of tech, then maybe they'd do it for another.

Isn't ent pretty much an orm like n/hibernate

It is an ORM, but I wouldn't call it just an ORM. I don't have experience with NHibernate, but most ORMs I have experience with feel like just a way progammatically build queries. I found EntMutator to provide nice abstractions to couple data changes with business logic like mutation triggers and observers. Again, all the additional tooling built around the Ent framework adds to the value.

Things like observers are fairly available in the orm land too. Same with mutators and unit of work and so on.

> IIRC, TAO has supported atomic transactions since at least when I was there a few years ago

TAO has supported single-shard atomic updates forever but this work is about cross-shared transactions. I left a few years ago as well and this didn't exist at the time.

Yeah I think a lot of people would enjoy writeups of those frameworks.

There's also this very nice Ent framework, written by ex-FB engineer: https://ent.dev/

Ah, that clears things up. That's sounds huge!

> There's also this very nice Ent framework, written by ex-FB engineer: https://ent.dev/

Awesome, hope it succeeds!

> I was there a few years ago

> Imagine if such amazing tools could be used at actually ethical companies.

Congratulations. How long did it take you to realize things are, in fact, as bad as the "haters" (to use a favorite term of the FB inner circle) said they were?

On a more on-topic note, is entGo actually worth implementing as an ORM for Go? I've always been suspicious of most ORMs for all of the various reasons we all know about letting other people manage your database connections, in terms of performance/etc...

I didn't leave due to the realization that the company was unethical, but there is a correlation there. I left because I got burnt out by the culture built around performance incentives. I didn't encounter anyone at the company who had inherently malicious or exploitative intent, but the culture drives the individual behaviors that in aggregate leads to all the harm caused by the company. That being said, everyone there, including myself should feel somewhat accountable, but it's really mostly on the leadership for having the power to change the culture but neglecting to do so.

> is entGo actually worth implementing as an ORM for Go

I can't speak to how valuable it would be when judged on its own. I just think that it currently does not and probably will not come close to delivering the same level of value as the FB Ent framework.

I appreciate this reply. The sentiment you’ve shared is the same that a lot of current/former Facebook employees have privately emailed / called / etc and told me. The interesting thing is, it’s a lot of the seriously talented engineers and designers who care about these things the most, so there is hope for our future in what all of you will do based on these bad experiences.

EntGo seems to be like it would be useful if used in combination with a bunch of other stuff that was built to take advantage of it, but that’s just my quick impression after looking through the docs. If entity modeling is your thing, I would be interested to know what you thought of Ecto in the Phoenix/Elixir ecosystem.

> ethical companies

What a cute oxymoron!

why do tools like this and others always get invented at unethical companies?

Developing tools costs money and unethical companies will always be more profitable than ethical ones as they have access to both ethical and unethical revenue streams. More profits means more money to throw at NIH projects.

The less barriers the people in an organization perceive, the more likely they are to innovate, whether for the greater good or not.

I agree with your point, but I've personally also experienced the reverse as well - having very difficult constraints while being extremely motivated and well funded has often resulted in extremely innovative solutions. All of my examples are classified, sadly.

I can see how more constraints can lead to more focused problem solving for sure.

Unethical companies get rewarded for their unethical behavior instead of being held accountable in any meaningful way. They then use their vast resources to grow their engineering force at an incredible rate. Moving fast means they are also accruing technical debt at an astounding rate, which then leads to throwing more of their resources at people to focus solely on solving these scaling problems.

Are there another kind of company that has 2 billion plus users? Can you store 500 edges * 2 billion users in a off the shelf database system? That was available in 2009? It is from scale and necessity that this kind of software is created.

Unethical from your point of view

still unethical no matter how you slice it.

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