Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot is generally available

github.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 796 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#531

Post by [deleted] »

candiddevmike wrote: post #110
bluelightning2k wrote: post #100

My unpopular take: most comments here are super entitled. To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE". Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could get. And no. They don't owe you anything. In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less directly provide your IDE…

That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#532

Post by bjconlan »

BrandonJung wrote: post #487
wiremine wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the CTO for a small(ish) software consultancy. $10/month is a no-brainer price for just the "amazing all-rounder autocomplete". Spending $10/month/dev to help maximize highly billable engineers? It's well worth the price.

would you prefer it trained ONLY on your code or are you ok with the broad use of non-permissive code used for CODEX?

Yeah I was thinking this... Does codex provide other directed sources of learning. I guess I should look deeper into textsynth/Bellard's gpt stuff as it would be nice to have some specialised learning here like only http level interfaces with client server or whatever... But a rails like gen probably gets me there way faster

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#533

Post by tedunangst »

xigoi wrote: post #520
tedunangst wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1 is worth what, one minute of your time? If you're using a tool that doesn't even save you one minute, why bother?

What proportion of people are making $1 per minute?

$1 per minute is approximately $120k annual salary, so... almost anybody doing software development in the US?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#534

Post by BrandonJung »

albertzeyer wrote: post #406
tkiolp4 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about the learning part, it’s about the copyright and money part. If you learn how to play song X by The Rolling Stones, you cannot just make money playing song X in a concert. Sure thing you can play song X in your father’s birthday. Here GitHub (Microsoft) is charging for a product that in certain circumstances violates copyright.

But Copilot (or a human) is not copying some existing code. It (Copilot or human) just used existing code to learn. So it is only about the learning part, nothing else. Yes, if Copilot (or a human) would copy existing code, that would be a copyright violation. But none of the arguments here are about that. It's just about the learning.

it is possible that on a long snippet that you could be copying code from non-permissive code. In addition GitHub themselves have said that this is not resolved and will likely need to be adjudicated in the courts. The only way to avoid this is to train on only fully permissive code. We know here at Tabnine having done this for 5+ years.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#535

Post by tedunangst »

presentation wrote: post #455
tedunangst wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1 is worth what, one minute of your time? If you're using a tool that doesn't even save you one minute, why bother?

Most people don't make purchasing decisions based on the value they create but rather based on some ingrained assumptions about how expensive software is supposed to be. VSCode and many other complex pieces of software are free, autocomplete is built into my OS, and those subscription consumer software that does have a price usually are priced very low—so relative to those, $10/month feels like a lot (even though I h…

You'd think "very smart" programmers would be equipped to do basic cost/benefit analysis. If it costs $900 and provides $1000 in value, that's $100 more than not buying it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#536

Post by naniwaduni »

kvetching wrote: post #343
jmkni wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using Copilot non-stop > I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo These two statments seem contradictory to me. Why are you using it 'non-stop' if it isn't even worth $10/month?

At first, I read it as if he thinks it's worth way more.

It honestly might be the kind of product where it might make sense at a higher price point, with more customer buy-in (and support contracts!) to work around its quirks rather than accept everything it spits out at face value. It's a more common pattern than we're used to seeing, I think.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#537

Post by BrandonJung »

curo wrote: post #172

Copilot is a steal at $10/m. HN can set itself apart from Twitter and Reddit by celebrating great achievements rather than tearing them down. Copilot stands on the shoulders of open source, yes. So do many of our personal and commercial projects. Copilot benefitted from having beta users. That relationship went both ways. A big thanks to the Copilot team for letting us be a part of the beta. I will happily pay $10/m…

to be clear they actually took much of what Tabnine was doing and declined to let us use GPT3 (MSFT closed Open AI). It turned out to be good because there are lots of other great models out there from T5 (SFDC), Meta, Google, etc that will continue to move forward faster.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#538

Post by matsemann »

DantesKite wrote: post #521
matsemann wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't an attempt at insinuating anything in general, it was just an observation based on the parent comment's own admission. Please remember this from the guidelines > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> It wasn't an attempt at insinuating anything in general, it was just an observation based on the parent comment's own admission. I don't think that's true. When the parent comment made that observation, they attached the caveat they might not be as skilled as others. They were already fully aware their potential lack of skill might affect their opinion of the product. All you did was repeat that same claim back to…

No, I explained why I thought it didn't provide value to me, in the context of having a different background than the person I responded to. Nothing malicious intended in that.

I find you having to write 3 long paragraphs of bullshit about that to be the truly astonishing thing here. Holy crap.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#539

Post by albertzeyer »

BrandonJung wrote: post #534
albertzeyer wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Copilot (or a human) is not copying some existing code. It (Copilot or human) just used existing code to learn. So it is only about the learning part, nothing else. Yes, if Copilot (or a human) would copy existing code, that would be a copyright violation. But none of the arguments here are about that. It's just about the learning.

it is possible that on a long snippet that you could be copying code from non-permissive code. In addition GitHub themselves have said that this is not resolved and will likely need to be adjudicated in the courts. The only way to avoid this is to train on only fully permissive code. We know here at Tabnine having done this for 5+ years.

And again, the same applies for a human as well. It's just the same.

I'm pretty sure I have done that by accident already in the past without noticing. This is not so unusual when you write some code with very common patterns.

And then this even can apply for code which you have not seen before. E.g. write some bubble sort function. Very likely you will find exactly the same code online.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#540

Post by twic »

rasz wrote: post #523
causi wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The only reason it hasn't been utterly dogpiled by lawyers is that far fewer people care about code than other forms of IP. If I made an AI assistant called PhotoStar to help with digital art and it just attaches Big Bird's face onto a character in my children's book I'm going to get sued. "Hey now, I just hit paste , the software pressed copy by itself" is not going to hold up.

https://i.postimg.cc/0QhH9bS8/dallemini-2022-6-22-0-48-28.pn...

Fortunately, it can also generate high-quality completely novel characters, every bit as lovable and unthreatening as Big Bird:

https://imgur.com/a/ppeclPL

Post reply on HN