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

731–740 of 796 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#731

Post by drran »

blagie wrote: post #708
codegladiator wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see a scope for troll code GPLers, something along the lines of troll patents ?

No. There's nothing magical about GPL code. Sticking a license on code doesn't suddenly lead to astronomical damages. No one has won billions of dollars on GPL enforcement. It's not how courts work. Contrary to popular belief, courts also won't compel compliance (e.g. releasing my code); if I break your license, the standard recourse is damages, whether that's GPL or All Rights Reserved. Otherwise, I'd make the First…

In this case, exchange is not fair, it's a scam, while in case of GPL, exchange is fair (code for code), so it's a valid open contract. You use my code, I use your.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#732

Post by marcosdumay »

saimiam wrote: post #684
haspok wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why write that boring unit test at all? If it is not only boring, but also automatically generated, then what value does it add to the code? I would argue it actually _decreases_ the value, because you now have that much more code to maintain and understand. 90% of unit tests people write are garbage according to my experience.

This take is too reductionist. Every website ever has a boring unit test called “Is it up?” where you check if the site is still working after a deployment. Boring and repetitive but of infinite value if you can detect early that your deployment broke something. If a boring/boilerplate unit test like this can deliver value, other b/b unit tests are probably going to similar impacts and hence, saying they all “decreas…

> Every website ever has a boring unit test called “Is it up?”

Yeah, and it should come almost automatically from the tooling. If you are writting this, you have a tooling problem.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#733

Post by IncRnd »

drran wrote: post #731
blagie wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There's nothing magical about GPL code. Sticking a license on code doesn't suddenly lead to astronomical damages. No one has won billions of dollars on GPL enforcement. It's not how courts work. Contrary to popular belief, courts also won't compel compliance (e.g. releasing my code); if I break your license, the standard recourse is damages, whether that's GPL or All Rights Reserved. Otherwise, I'd make the First…

In this case, exchange is not fair, it's a scam, while in case of GPL, exchange is fair (code for code), so it's a valid open contract. You use my code, I use your.

Copilot doesn't reuse code. None of the code it regurgitates has the required license.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#734

Post by jerf »

3pt14159 wrote: post #499
omginternets wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis, but feel like it’s ignoring the elephant in the room: writing code is not the bottleneck in need of optimization. Conceiving the solution is. Any time “saved” through Copilot and it’s ilk is immediately nullified by having to check it’s correctness. From there, the problem is worsened by the Frankensteinesque stitching together of disparate parts that you describe. I can’t i…

Right on the money. What I want is a copilot that finds errors ala spellcheck-esque. Did I miss an early return? For example in the code below def some_worker if disabled_via_feature_flag logger.info("skipping some_worker") some_potentially_hazardous_method_call() Right after the logger call I missed a return. A copilot could easily catch this. Invert the relationship. I don't need some boilerplate generator, I need…

Yes, that's a lot more interesting. Firing a "code review" bot at my code where it asks me questions would be potentially interesting. Even if it sometimes asked some blindingly stupid questions, if I was not obligated to respond to them, I'd be OK with that.

The main problem with that is, GPT-3 can't do that. Personally, while I sing the praises of GPT as a technology, and I do mean it, at the same time... it's actually not a very useful primitive to build further technology on. The question "if you were to continue this text, what would you continue it with?" is hard to build much more than what you see with Copilot. Without a concept of "why are you continuing it with that?" (which, in some sense, the neural net can answer, but the answer exists in a way that humans can not understand and there is no apparent practical way to convert that into something humans can understand).

So GPT-x may yet advance and is fascinating technology, but at the same time, in a lot of ways it's just not that useful.

It reminds me of the video game world, where we have just staggeringly unbelievable graphics technology, and everything else lags behind this spike. Being visual creatures, it causes us to badly overestimate what's actually going on in there. Similarly, it's great that AI has these talkerbots, but they've made a whole lot of progress on something that gives a good appearance, but doesn't necessarily represent the state of the art anywhere else. This AI branch of tech is a huge spike ahead of everything else. But it's not clear to me this technology is anything but a dead end, in the end, because it's just so hard to use it for anything truly useful.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#735

Post by saimiam »

marcosdumay wrote: post #732
saimiam wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take is too reductionist. Every website ever has a boring unit test called “Is it up?” where you check if the site is still working after a deployment. Boring and repetitive but of infinite value if you can detect early that your deployment broke something. If a boring/boilerplate unit test like this can deliver value, other b/b unit tests are probably going to similar impacts and hence, saying they all “decreas…

> Every website ever has a boring unit test called “Is it up?” Yeah, and it should come almost automatically from the tooling. If you are writting this, you have a tooling problem.

No product starts with an elaborate ci/cd pipeline and automated test suite. Many evolve into needing such tooling after having had an incident or two when a deployment broke the site…and the response invariably is that “we should have written a suite of really basic tests which goes to the home page and checks if the hero image is visible.”

If co-pilot’s autogenerated test cases can help prevent this head smacking, it will have proved that basic/boilerplate code was valuable.

The site checker included in the tooling is just a more mature version of the boilerplate unit test co-pilot gives us.

Btw, I have no skin in the game -never used co-pilot…just surprised that HN commenters can be so dismissive of wanting to get the basics right - like having some test coverage.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#736

Post by anonymoushn »

LegitShady wrote: post #148
nimbius wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from Microsofts standpoint the shot across the bow for open source licenses is clear: do you have enough lawyers and experts to convince a gerontocracy of the legislative branch of the US government that its not "okay because its AI" because if you dont, then thanks for the code nerd.

it sounds like a good basis for a class action lawsuit, where the class are the people who own the licensed code whose license microsoft is ignoring.

Seems like I'll get paid for this a while after I get paid for TurnItIn selling a product based on stealing my work

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#737

Post by dahart »

account42 wrote: post #681
dahart wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone notices this and sues the commercial project for breaking GPL v3. I know what you mean, but silly nit pick since you mentioned “commercial” twice - GPL v3 does not prevent commercial use, it only requires copies to be open source. For someone to notice the project has copied code and not be inside the company, the code would (probably) have to be open source. So, this hypothetical is less likely to happen t…

> I know what you mean, but silly nit pick since you mentioned “commercial” twice - GPL v3 does not prevent commercial use, it only requires copies to be open source. For someone to notice the project has copied code and not be inside the company, the code would (probably) have to be open source. So, this hypothetical is less likely to happen than your comment makes it sound. The are plenty of source available or ope…

> Letting github host and display the code is compatible with open source licenses but is very much different from letting third parties incorporate that code into non-open codebases.

Agree completely. It’s still a fact that GitHub’s Terms provide a separate license for Github. See section D.4 https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

> GitHub TOS can only possibly give them authorization from those directly uploading code to GitHub. They don’t give github any additional license for code that was uploaded by a someone else (for example a mirror bot) becose that someone does not have the rights to give out that license.

GitHub’s terms already require that uploaders have copyright authorization, or that machine uploaders are doing automated tasks exclusively. Letting a machine upload someone else’s new and copyright code that the account owner doesn’t have copyrights to appears to violate GitHub’s terms. “the owner of the Account is ultimately responsible for the machine's actions” https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

> even if they write in the TOS that they can do whatever they want it does not mean that they can actually legally do whatever they want

Yes, correct, I completely agree. Asking for people to agree to ‘indemnify and hold harmless’ over the site’s features is standard language and not really a stretch, it doesn’t amount to Github doing whatever they want. That language is already in the terms.

What is the summary of your comment, what are you trying to say at a high level? We can debate the fine points, but if you are trying to say that my speculative suggestion was crappy and Github has other ways to make copilot legal, then I agree. If you’re trying to say that Github has no legal way to make copilot available, then I disagree.

There is already language in the terms that might cover copilot. Section D.4 I linked to above includes this:

“This license [that you grant us] includes the right to do things like copy it [your content] to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.“

The Copilot FAQ also mentions they have IP filters and actively prevent reciting large portions of anyone’s code, it explicitly mentions a threshold of 150 characters.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#738

Post by marcosdumay »

vosper wrote: post #353
omginternets wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis, but feel like it’s ignoring the elephant in the room: writing code is not the bottleneck in need of optimization. Conceiving the solution is. Any time “saved” through Copilot and it’s ilk is immediately nullified by having to check it’s correctness. From there, the problem is worsened by the Frankensteinesque stitching together of disparate parts that you describe. I can’t i…

> I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis, but feel like it’s ignoring the elephant in the room: writing code is not the bottleneck in need of optimization. Conceiving the solution is. I dunno about this. I know the received wisdom is that "writing the code isn't the hard part", but I think reality is more like "writing the code is only one of the hard parts". There's an awful lot of badly-written code, or code whi…

> I know the received wisdom is that "writing the code isn't the hard part", but I think reality is more like "writing the code is only one of the hard parts".

Writing the code isn't the bottleneck. And there is no point in optimizing some part of a process that isn't a bottleneck.

Anyway, have you noticed that "understandably and correctly" isn't included on the OP's definition of "writing code"? That's for a reason, and it's the most adequate definition to use on this context.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#739

Post by tedunangst »

account42 wrote: post #686
tedunangst wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd think "very smart" programmers would be equipped to consider additional factors such as the cost of getting reliant on a tool controlled by a single vendor as well as the effects on other things that they care about. You'd think they also understand that people are not machines and reducing a task by a certain time does not neccessarily mean that they can get that much more work more done overall.

If the amortized benefit is less than one minute per month, then it's probably best to simply pass instead of hoping for a price adjustment.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#740

Post by marcosdumay »

nimbius wrote: post #46
lelandfe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previously discussed at length here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27773157 > or assure the developer, that the inserted/suggested code is not a verbatim copy of existing code No, it does not do that. > How can developers be sure, that they are not violating licenses by using Copilot There are no clear answers.

from Microsofts standpoint the shot across the bow for open source licenses is clear: do you have enough lawyers and experts to convince a gerontocracy of the legislative branch of the US government that its not "okay because its AI" because if you dont, then thanks for the code nerd.

I really want MS to try that theory in a court and win.

That will destroy the propaganda that the Law is there to protect content creators better than anything the people against copyrights can come-up with.

Post reply on HN