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Comment by aequitas | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion hiding code is an anti feature as exposing the code by default gives you more incentive to write clean understandable and explaining (self documenting) code as it's always visible. By hiding it people might be more likely to paste in big blobs ugly code that would be much better put into a reusable function then in a notebook snippet.

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Thats true if you sharing with someone who also understands the code - we think that the feature allows you to share the notebooks with a completely non-technical audience.

Image you had a notebook to analyse sales data and you needed to present the results to your CEO (who perhaps cannot code) - this feature lets you present the notebook as is, without needing to prepare a report in some other format

Why would you share a notebook with somebody who doesn't understand the code?? What are they supposed to do with them anyways? Reading? Isn't that what PDF is for? Just give them PDFs, C*O people have got piles of other things to worry about besides shared notebooks.

Mostly so you don't need to convert to PDF and so that you can host the reports in a central place where everyone can read them technical or not.

Like an internal wiki for a companies data-science where the technical people can communicate their work to the non-technical people with a pretty seamless experience

This is not the experience non-technical senior leadership people are looking for, unless you are a 10-people startup.

Im not sure - we have large teams using Kyso as a knowledge base for data-science work and there's also Airbnb's knowledge-repo which originally inspired us so from my point of view there is decent evidence for the need for this

Ah, that makes sense. So, basically you replaced a dashboard effort with a whole bunch of readonly notebooks, thus distributing the information delivery job among the peers outside of your DS team. Clever.

Let me elaborate. Delivering information is a job. Either you do this by yourself -- by translating from your datascience-speak (aka notebooks) to the business-speak (aka concise, targeted PDFs) -- or you make stakeholders do that job instead of you.

You effectively say to them "I want you to be proactive and go ahead and grab this food which I prepared for you and placed here and here and over there, and by the way plates and utensils are in that corner, help yourself" instead of "I though you might need this, here it is."

The way you do it works in some orgs, but generally it doesn't.

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