GitHub Copilot is generally available • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#631

Post by rmbyrro » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

bovermyer wrote: post #609

rmbyrro wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't your forgetting issue something that spaced repetition would solve while also building confidence in yourself?

Spaced repetition doesn't help with the use case of needing to recall lots of little details spread across a wide number of knowledge domains. You'd spend more time trying to remember everything than on actually doing useful work. Also, that little "building confidence in yourself" rider that you added suggests that you think the OP doesn't have confidence in themselves. Careful about those assumptions; in this case…

> Also, that little "building confidence in yourself" rider that you added suggests that you think the OP doesn't have confidence in themselves.

They certainly do have confidence, but it doesn't hurt building upon it. I don't think confidence is a discrete 0 or 1 variable. It's a continuous variable, from 0 to infinity.

By the way, I made a question, not a statement. I welcome the argument on whether it's worth the time to memorize the stuff Autopilot can autocomplete. That's something to measure and debate.

> Careful about those assumptions; in this case it comes across as a little patronizing.

Thanks for the heads up. This is important. But I didn't make any assumption. It seems maybe you made an assumption about me making an assumption?

If that's the case, don't worry as I did not feel patronized.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#632

Post by rmbyrro » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

alexeldeib wrote: post #596

rmbyrro wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't your forgetting issue something that spaced repetition would solve while also building confidence in yourself?

I find it’s less about actually forgetting and more about all the mundane details I usually bounce around a codebase to find. What’s the third argument to that function again? Oh, copilot autocompleted it correctly. It’s not always right but it’s right enough it’s a big timesaver.

> Oh, copilot autocompleted it correctly.

That assumes I once had the knowledge of what is "correct".

I just don't quite remember it right now. Then I rely on Autopilot to complete it.

Sometimes I may not feel sure enough to judge whether Copilot is right. I'll need to dig the documentation anyways.

Other times I'll feel sure. But in how many of those I'll be wrong? And what will be the consequences?

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#633

Post by eat_lemons » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

anon2020dot00 wrote: post #14

zelphirkalt wrote: post #9

Does Copilot already display the licenses of the code it might insert/suggest, or assure the developer, that the inserted/suggested code is not a verbatim copy of existing code? How can developers be sure, that they are not violating licenses by using Copilot?

My sincere question is what if a developer looks at some GPL code, and then that developer encounters a situation in a corporate project where-in he uses the GPL code from memory, is that already a violation? So to avoid a violation a developer needs to perform a mind-wipe?

There are many instances of people not even being able to see the code in question, see clean room engineering

An example for wine/proton/reactos developers from a moderator on the forum about the leaked windows xp code:

"You look at the code? You worked for MS? No dev for us! It's that easy."

https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20189

There are many instances of large lawsuits where just seeing the old code made you in eligible to even touch the new code

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#634

Post by rmbyrro » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

blagie wrote: post #597

rmbyrro wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't your forgetting issue something that spaced repetition would solve while also building confidence in yourself?

No. Spaced repetition is a good tool for learning vocabulary. It's not a silver bullet / holy grail / MacGuffin / etc. There's a community of people obsessed with spaced repetition. None of them seem to have accomplished spectacular feats of learning. There's a good reason for that. (The flip side, however, is that many people who have accomplished spectacular feats of learning DO often use spaced repetition, but amo…

Could you please help me understand further? I found this a bit contradictory:

> None of them seem to have accomplished spectacular feats of learning

> many people who have accomplished spectacular feats of learning DO often use spaced repetition

---

Second note:

> Spaced repetition is a good tool for learning vocabulary.

This might be a misconception? The first ever published paper about spaced repetition was about vocabulary.

But research has shown its merits are valid for many other types of knowledge.

By the way, memorizing coding vocabulary is arguably similar to human language vocabulary.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#635

Post by eat_lemons » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

kromem wrote: post #392

matsemann wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it perhaps be you not coding for a living (and being lower in skill as you say) that make you think it's worth it? For me the bottleneck is seldom typing. And while Copilot can sometimes dish out some more advanced stuff, I still have to verify it and understand it. Since I can basically solve every problem I encounter day-to-day, Copilot's contribution is not that useful.

I code for a living and have done so for over a decade now, and I completely agree with their analysis. Does it save you $10 worth of your time within a month? Comments here are wildly uninformed. I see comments complaining about copyright that seem to have no awareness of either fair use doctrine prior law as it relates to partial usage nor the details regarding how infrequently Copilot generates identifiable verbat…

Counterpoint look at the bios lawsuits that IBM won against people who had just seen IBM's code

Or the windows xp leak and how that is a mess for wine/proton/reactos devs

There is no concept of fair use in code copyright

Copilot is 100% a ask for forgiveness later sort of project

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#636

Post by eat_lemons » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

natefinch wrote: post #188

cube00 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> monetizing the efforts ...and not compensating (or even attributing as required by the licenses) the authors for it.

It's not copying open source code. If you learn an algorithm to balance a binary tree from reading GPL code, and then go use that algorithm in your own closed-source project, with your own variables and types and context, are you breaking GPL? You're not copying the code. Just because you learned about it from reading GPL code doesn't mean that whenever you write tree balancing code from now until the end of time, al…

Read up on clean room design and the IBM lawsuits from the 80's and 90's

Just seeing someone else's code is hazardous from a legal precident point of view

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#637

Post by suyash » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

ultra_nick wrote: post #534

Otek wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly but I think we’re talking years if not decades.

Everyone would need a next gen GPU to run it and someone would have to drop $500k on a gpu rack to train it. A decade for general accessibility sounds right.

No the ML inference can be done on the cloud or use tiny models and embed them in IDE code, possible today.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#638

Post by d4rkp4ttern » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #599

Waiting for a pycharm plugin

Never mind there is a pyCharm plugin. And I am impressed. Example —

  # use numba to speed up the accumulation of the moving average

  @numba.jit("float64[:](float64[:], float64[:])", nopython=True, nogil=True)
  def moving_average(x, a):
      n = len(x)
      y = np.empty(n, dtype=np.float64)
      y[0] = x[0]
      for i in range(1, n):
          y[i] = y[i-1]*a[i-1] + x[i]*a[i]
      return y

I would have found it with a stack overflow search but it gave me this after I just typed :

  # use numba to …

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#639

Post by staticassertion » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

titaniczero wrote: post #573

staticassertion wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it's easily worth twice that, so I'm happy to pay 100/year.

Jetbrains costs $150/y. IMO, an autocomplete is not worth $100/y at all, let alone $200/y.

I also happily pay for Jetbrains.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#640

Post by Micoloth » Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

ilikehurdles wrote: post #18

I hope I never again have to work on a codebase/language where copilot would be worth subscribing to.

Yes this is the the whole point of this

Unfortunately, there is no way I can hope for that much…

So yes, please, take my money and do All my boilerplate lol