Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot

#712
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those developers worried about having their jobs replaced by a code-writing AI? :) I mean... why would 95% of developer jobs exist with this tech available? You just need that 5% of devs who actually write novel code for this thing to learn from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella) An Isaac Asimov story about someone who didn't take to the program and, as a result, got picked to create new things because someone has to make them.

I love this story.

If you want to read the whole thing, it's here:

https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

Re: GitHub Copilot

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I put a section in my LICENSE.txt prohibiting use as training data in commercial models, would that be sufficient to keep my code out of models like this?

> If I put a section in my LICENSE.txt prohibiting use as training data in commercial models, would that be sufficient to keep my code out of models like this? Neither in practice (because it doesn't look for it) nor legally in the US, if Microsoft’s contention that such use is “fair use” under US copyright law. That “fair use” is an Americanism and not a general feature of copyright law might create some interesting…

would be interesting if someone uploaded a leaked copy of the NT kernel, then coerced the system to regurgitate it piece by piece

would MS position then be different?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#714

I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…

Have you used any intelligent code completion in the past? E.g. I'd really be interested how it compares to TabNine[0], which already gives pretty amazing single line suggestions (haven't tried their experimental multi-line suggestions yet). [0]: https://www.tabnine.com

Interestingly the founder of TabNine (which was acquired by Codota[0]) is currently working at Open AI (edit: comments corrected me he left in December 2020 according to his blog). I imagine they're livid about Open AI creating a competing product.

TabNine at times was magical, but I stopped using it after Codota started injecting ads directly into my editor[1]

[0] https://betakit.com/waterloo-startup-tabnine-acquired-by-isr... [1] https://github.com/codota/TabNine/issues/342

Re: GitHub Copilot

#715
post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general: (1) training ML systems on public data is fair use (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler. On the training question specifically, you can find OpenAI's position, as submitted to the USPTO here: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_R... We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're eager to…

You should look into: https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h... Great achievements like this only hammer home the point more about how illogical copyright and patent laws are. Ideas are always shared creations, by definition. If you have an “original idea”, all you really have is noise! If your idea means anything to anyone, then by definition it is built on other ideas, it is a shared creation.…

I'm sure natfriedman will be thrilled to abolish IP and also apply this to the Windows source code. We can expect it on GitHub any minute!

Re: GitHub Copilot

#716

Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're so excited to be able to show it off today. Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a paid product at some point in the future.

This is impressive. And scary. How long has your team been working on this first release?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#717
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With VSCode, Github and a perhaps a little bit of help from OpenAI, Microsoft is poised to dominate the developer productivity tools market in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised to see really good static analysis and automated code review tools coming out of these teams very soon.

And still Windows is a mess.

I've been on both Windows and Ubuntu for a while. I'd say Ubuntu has a ton more issues and requires a ton more initial configuration to behave "normally".

I don't even remember the last time Windows got in my way, in fact.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#718

The landing page is really cool. It looks like the screencast is built with Javascript, is there any tool that helps building such screencasts? I assume that it's not trivial to build such animations.

Depends on what you need to do, but asciinema is pretty much exactly that use case: https://asciinema.org/

Wouldn’t work in this case with the overlays and styling tho.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#719
post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The landing page for it states the below, so hopefully not too much of an issue (though I guess some folks may find a 0.1% risk high). > GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set.

I'd be surprised if a company's legal department would be OK with that 0.1% risk.

Google already learned that one. "There's only a tiny chance we may be copying some public code from Oracle." may not be a good explanation there.
Post reply on HN