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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Way to undermine an interesting product launch through poorly chosen language:

> Let’s be frank the single‑player notebook has felt outdated for a while now. We’re open‑sourcing its successor. Jupyter belongs in the hall of great ideas — alongside “Hello, world.” and “View Source.”

If you're trying to reach out to the Python community this is not the way to do it. Completely unnecessary hostile language there! Have some respect.

My advice to Deepnote is to scrap this launch announcement (ideally with an apology) and try again. They've built something genuinely useful and interesting but it's going go get a lot less attention than it deserves if they introduce the open source version to the world like this.

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The whole post feels like it was edited/modified by ChatGPT; `What we opened — in English, not a changelog`, `Why it matters (no fluff):`, `We are big believers in notebooks — full stop` are patterns that always make me feel like an LLM wrote it (sentence followed by a marketing qualifier).

I really liked Deepnote the product when I last used it, but the post definitely feels off.

Been thinking about this lately because I find my writing style is a little bit like annoying slightly sycophantic overly-hyphenated-with-an-emdash-here-and-there LLMs. Since LLMs are trained on the Internet, wouldn't some portion of posts that fall in the middle of the "voice bell curve" always sound like LLMs and thus be open to this critique even when they are 100% human written?

This is just the generic LinkedIn marketing prose

Well, you are probably right. Pasting the annoucement in gptzero yields this: 16% AI generated 84% Mixed 0% Human

"We are big believers in notebooks — full stop" could be more succinctly written as "We are big believers in notebooks."

I don't think an LLM wrote it; this has been their brand voice for a long time...

I saw this on LinkedIn earlier and literally closed it after “ Let’s be frank the single‑player notebook has felt outdated for a while now”

I think it must be messaging for “leadership” as opposed to practitioners, there are lots of real pain points but they don’t seem to be mentioning them

> an interesting product launch

This looks less like an "interesting" product, and more like a case of pivoting a commercial product that isn't making enough money into an open source one in the hope of at least gaining some credibility from all that work as well as undercutting the competition.

> They've built something genuinely useful and interesting

This core product has been around for years now. If it was that interesting and useful, more people would have likely paid for the original offering.

I would certainly recommend taking this 'release' with a touch more cynicism.

Completely agree. I don't know anyone who isn't financially incentivized to see the Jupyter project fail who feels this way about Jupyter. This whole post stinks of "we're losing to Jupyter so let's throw up a ridiculous Hail Mary".

Simple explanation, they used AI as a voice for their writing instead of using it as a tool for writing in their own voice.

LLMs are good to proofread, check your tone, generate ideas, etc.

Letting them take over your connection with an audience or be a substitute for gut checks or taste is not helping anyone.

Seeing such pivotal announcement be poorly vetted slop doesn't really inspire confidence in the quality of their product.

When we stand on the shoulders of giants, we don’t do so to dump on them.

I do not often make a point after upvoting but instead of writing more or less the same: this ^. If not for the open source, I would have closed the the page after that blurb thinking something is off and I do not need it.

TIL "Hello world!" has been put out to pasture.

Who needs Hello World when you can have an LLM implement an entire number guessing game for you?

For when the LLM completely screws up the code as it does

Why is "View source" listed here as if it's some outdated feature of the past?

Probably an AI wrote large parts of this press release.

That’s no excuse. Someone shipped it (and ostensibly read it).

100%, you can feel this is GPT5 style.

At least they did a s/—/-/ in the copy

it is since Javascript compilers and minification became a thing

The whole article felt very dishonest and frankly quite rude towards Jupyter. Self-declaring themselves to be the successor to a project that's still alive and that they seemingly have absolutely no legitimate claim to, and then going on to bash it by saying it's dying because job postings are decreasing and commits are decreasing, the latter point is especially dishonest considering Jupyter is already quite complete and fully featured so maybe it doesn't need constant daily commits?

Maybe they should focus less on bashing Jupyter and more of showing what's good about them, for example they stated multiple times that Jupyter is messy JSON but they never showed off their own format... Just some vague hand-wavy "perfect for AI!"

I haven’t read something so presumptuous and offputting since the Ubuntu “neckbeard” blog post. I don’t particularly like developing in Jupyter, but whatever this is, it’s gross and I’ll have no part of it.

It reads like a sales call where they’re getting customer pushback and responding with something quantitative - not a good opener at all, especially for this audience. The GPT tone pushes it over the edge.

What they built looks great and I don’t disagree with their take in substance, but you get one chance to make your open source announcement good - don’t blow it like this.

I don't know if I'm missing something here, but I think they rephrased the article, or at least the quoted sentence is not there anymore.

Edit: I checked with wayback machine and they definitely modified the article.

it’s what happens when people use LLMs to write their posts. Rubbishing Jupyter is an obvious choice if you’re a machine writing a compelling post. Rubbishing Jupyter if you’re a human being with a stake in the space is a terrible choice.

My constructive advice for deepnote: if you don’t have something to say from the heart, don’t ask an LLM to generate something for you. Write less, not more. For a post this important, an LLM is a terrible choice.

>If you're trying to reach out to the Python community this is not the way to do it. Completely unnecessary hostile language there! Have some respect.

The note sounds as written by some manager/marketing guy that has 20 years to touch a line of code...

For sure it put my off even checking what their shit is (from initially interested upon seeing the HN post).

Yes. This wording just misses the mark and sounds super tone deaf

Not sure that an apology is necessary though. Some overconfident marketing person tried something, and it failed. That's what happens if you try stuff. They should just try harder next time

Thanks for the feedback Simon!

Did you... read it?

Apparently they're continuing the tone-deaf announcement with tone-deaf responses to feedback.

“Just post through it” is a tried and true tactic!

They did edit the post..

With no annotations of what was changed or acknowledgment of that things were even changed.

I read it originally when it came out, didnt have a chance to respond initially then came back to look through the comments. If there was anything was changed, it's not obviously apparent...

I guess some of you are just looking for ways they are wrong. They can't win.

They shouldn't "win" unless they acknowledge the issue.

Merely retroactively changing the post doesn't inspire confidence they now 'get' the value of the Jupyter and its community and respect it

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