skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The amount of shit GitHub is getting over this is magnitudes larger than for all the evil stuff Google and Facebook have done with AI. But no comment from here.

This is not true. It's trivial to find probably two orders of magnitude more complaints about those larger companies on this site than the two or three days of Github bashing. It's also trivial to find hundreds of posts in threads saying "Everybody starts screaming when [Google/Apple/Facebook/the Government] does something like this, but people just let [Google/Apple/Facebook/the Government] get away with doing far worse."

When you do this, what you're doing is trying to shut down debate.
Copilot is actually not trained just on GitHub data, and the model is owned by OpenAI, not Microsoft. It relies on fair use, not any particular terms of service.

source: the faq at the bottom of https://copilot.github.com/

GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. It has been trained on a selection of English language and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub.
The whole cloth construction of suburbia after WWII in the US. It opened ownership to a class of people who never had access prior.
Unfortunately that description is so old it's misleading. I described BPF in another comment here.
The day I depend on an $800B corporation whose customers are other corporations and for whom my personal data is just an asset, in order to be able to speak and organize, is the day I am no longer free.

No law (Facebook's revenue in 2020 was more than twice the entire US Department of Justice's budget) nor good intention on the part of anyone currently in a leadership role at Facebook can in any meaningful way prevent them from abusing their position, if they want to. Certainly, convincing people in Facebook's leadership to do the right thing right now is not a meaningful solution.

I agree with you that the problem is market forces. If you tell people that they are free to make as much money as they want in any way they want, the natural, profitable result is the conglomeration of power. The invisible hand will scoop up everything into one big corporation. Even conventional antitrust law - the thing that prevents Big Tech from becoming a single overarching entity - is an admission that "market forces" are not actually good for society.

I'm a fan of proposals like this to address not only the serious danger of Big Tech but the ongoing danger that the market will create further monstrosities in the future: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
I wonder how much the design could be scaled down in size and sped up while maintaining performance characteristics. This is fascinating. Does anything think there will be a commercial option anytime soon, or is the design a dead end except as an experiment?
> we actually registered a patent on it in many countries around the world

Isn’t this counter-productive for military tech that’s supposed to give your troops an advantage in combat?
Someone has now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725760
Another good demonstration of how incredibly slow software is. Not 2x or even 10x, but rather 100x-1000x. Courtesy of our best practices. Zero regards for the user, CO2 or anything like that. Use libraries, frameworks and abstractions for everything. Not even understanding that sometimes (many?) this actually decreases maintainability, extensibility and performance.

The cherry on top is the level of ignorance on display in the github comments.
It's a deceptively complex with a lot of edge cases. Dependency resolution is a difficult problem, as are transactional updates. And you want it to be something that is bulletproof, since broken packages are a nightmare. It's not that hard to get something usable, but it can take a lot of effort to get something competitive with what people have come to expect from existing mature package managers.
Always amuses me when it slowly dawns on people just how much power a government can exert if it wants to.
Facebook, and most importantly it's advertisers, simply cannot afford to piss off countries. It is a battle that is not in their financial interest.
Corporations will not stand up for your rights. You want to fight the power you'll have to become tank man yourself.
Best childhood memories are from doing walks in the Lakes and having jets zip past in the valleys below. Insanely close, too — I distinctly remember seeing the pilot’s visor and making out white text on the side of the aircraft.
> In addition, if people are feeling charitable, the branch will be cleaned up prior to merge with an interactive rebase

If you're not doing that, might it not be better to squash? The point of not squashing is to preserve valuable granular commits. If you have WIP commits, those don't have much value.

I suppose it depends on how clean the feature branch is. Personally, I have horrible commits, knowing I will clean them up later.
We are currently going through a well-documented extinction[1]. It's not recent in human terms, but it's been accelerating recently, with industrialization.

Climate change is not the only, nor the major cause in the current extinction, but it contributes. In a way, this is unfortunate: it would be easier to have only one problem.

The relevant body for scientific information is not the IPCC, but the IPBES [2]. Like the IPCC, it releases reports summarizing the situation and its causes [3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Science-Poli...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Bi...
Zoom WebRTC Links
Part of filing for a suit is proving that you have the right to represent the individual. Usually this is easy, as most people are recognisable (leaglly) as representing themselves.

As the individual is officially deceased, you need some documentation from before they were recognised as such, granting their rights to a recognisable individual.

That is, the lawyer needs to be granted the right to represent her, but she probably doesn't currently have the necessary legal paperwork to give them that. She can't represent her own estate - she's legally dead.
> I'm afraid I don't think actually comes even close to resolving the legal implications of recitation.
If Copilot is reciting pieces of GPL code (which we know it can), then not only does it need to point out where it has grabbed that code from, Copilot itself is (probably) required to be GPL-licensed.

I dont follow. If the suggested code is GPLed, it’s your decision to include it in your code or not. If you accept the GPLed code into your nonGPLed code base, you violated the GPL. As a friend of mine said years ago about situations like this, “Saying ’I was just following the algorithm,’ is not a defense.”

Now let’s is Copilot a violation of the GPL? I’m going to assume that it’s codebase is not derived from GPL code. I have nothing to prove this, but most code is not, and Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are reputable organizations, so assuming good faith here seems fair.

Did Copilot train on GPLed code? Absolutely. I don’t think anyone has ever suggested otherwise.

Does processing the code count as an integration? I’d say no. It certainly isn’t part of the executable code base, even in binary form, which is what the GPL was targeting. Even if it was, it wouldn’t be a GPL violation, since the copilot binary isn’t being distributed, but it would be an AGPL violation. I don’t know how popularly the AGPL is, but let’s assuming that at at least something from some AGPLed file exists inside Copilot. Again that doesn’t matter, because the code isn’t actually being executed.

So is it “distributing” the code? Sure, but that’s not a violation. If you make a binary, you have to distribute the code, but the opposite isn’t true. Anyway, just having a piece of GPL source code in a database isn’t a violation, and never has been. You might as well bring saying that because Google’s search index can return entries of the Linux kernel, all of Google is in violation of the GPL. Not even RMS would take that extreme view.
> My boss took my label maker away. Apparently, I am "not responsible".

I'd consider that an honor.
I think Matthew Ball on Twitter is responsible for the increased usage of "Metaverse" amongst investors, business strategists, etc.

He recently launched an ETF ($META) that indexes to "Metaverse" companies (Roblox, Unity, etc.).

I have always been pretty cynical about his takes and usage of "Metaverse." There's a lot of hand-waving and ted-talky grandstanding to make the "Metaverse" concept seem like something new, exciting and inevitable. But using "Metaverse" seems overly complicated, its just describing a large, centralized online community which isn't a new concept. World of Warcraft or Minecraft may have been the peak of the "Metaverse" so far, so it seems disingenuous to treat the "Metaverse" as something new and novel.

Kinda've stream of consciousness from me - but all this really seems like is someone with a consultant background applying frameworks and buzzwords to concepts that felt childish and unserious for so long (WoW, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc.), but now people are realizing that these companies and games can spit out serious cash, so they love someone who can package it together nicely through these frameworks and thought pieces. Boomers love this!

https://twitter.com/ballmatthew
More like the book that LotR was based on (e.g. 2 Kings 6:17, Ephesians 6:12).
>It sounds like you're saying bad caching can be worse than no caching. I can absolutely see that being the case.

More specifically, I'm saying that caches (implicit or explicit) can and do go wrong, and the simplest way to avoid invalidation errors (and the performance hiccups when higher-level developers start manually invalidating the cache to work around them) is to just implement them in as few places as possible.
I don't think it should be infringement. You can't copyright an algorithm, and Carmack's function is like six lines of code. If you just read Carmack's source code, then rewrote the same algorithm with different variable names, it would clearly not be infringement. Is it really so bad if you keep his precise variable names, comments, and indentation? How does it hurt Carmack to reproduce this tiny snippet of code exactly, rather than with a small rewrite?
Beside that, I cannot understand why the overall idea, using open-source project to train a ML model that generates code would ever be a problem. We human beings are learning as the model, we read others code, books, articles, design patterns... and it becomes part of us.

It's an interesting question.

1) When a human being reads code or a CS text book, we think of them extracting general principles from the code and so not having to repeat that particular code again. In contrast, what GPT-3 and Copilot seem to do is just extract sequences of little snippets, something that apparently requires them to regurgitate the text they've been trained on. That seem rather permanently dependent on the training corpus.

2) Human beings have a natural urge, a natural ethos, to help people learn. It's understandable. The thing is, when suddenly you're not talking people but machines, the reason for this urge easily vanish. Even if github was extracting knowledge from the code, I wouldn't have a reason to help them do so since that knowledge would be their entirely private property. They expect to charge people whatever they judge the going rate would be - why should anyone be helping them without similar compensation? That this is being done by "OpenAI", a company which went from open-nonprofit to closed-for-profit in a matter of few years, should accent this point. We're nowhere near a system that could digest all the knowledge of humankind. But if we got there, one might argue the result should belong to humankind rather than to one genius entrepreneur. And having the result belong one genius entrepreneur has some clear downsides.
I’d be interested to see a breakdown in fuel/seat-mile. I bet air travel isn’t as inefficient as the millions of people traveling alone in a car every day to work.
Learning about this made Romanian, with all its words ending in -u, not seem strange suddenly!
I remember on the MSX that you could simply scroll up the cursor to the line that must be fixed, re-type just what was need to change and press enter.

The interface of some 80's home computers was surprisingly productive. A primitive form of completion was already implemented on ZX Spectrum (I think): you simply pressed a key and it automatically completed the BASIC command starting with the corresponding character.
I'll loop certain songs and just get jamming.
Now the question is, whether Microsoft has a more advanced tool that they train on private repositories?

How can you check whether Microsoft has infringed your private code? For example if they used an internal tool and part of my code is now in Windows 11? How do I check that?
I think it's kind of crazy to handwave away a whole class of creators who do make real money off selling their work (rather than being performers), even if it isn't big money or even enough to live on without supplemental income. And I categorically disagree that copyright isn't helping "any" of them. One counterexample is self-published authors on Amazon and similar services, many of whom do make a lot more money than a layperson might expect, and all of whom would obviously be cut off at the knees by squeaky-clean first-world aggregator-reader services the second the copyright protections of their works were revoked.
Sadly yes, but I don't think that model is even sustainable let alone desirable. We must do better. Since these things do take so much time, that means we must reach some agreement on what "better means" (which doesn't at all have to be the same everywhere) and get moving toward it.
I agree on “carte d’identité”, which is easily translatable as “ID card”. But outside of France there’s no concept of “grande école”, so you can't translate it. It’s arguable if “mairie” can be translated as “town hall”, because as far as I understand a French “mairie” and a British town hall don’t serve the same purpose.
I don't think it's necessarily a concentrated effort on behalf of any one entity - anecdotally it just seems to be the new buzzword marketing departments have latched onto now that pitching blockchain/NFTs alone doesn't cut it anymore. Without checking, it wouldn't surprise me if Clubhouse is 50% "how to BUILD your BRAND in the METAVERSE" right now, even if nobody can quite pin down what it means, what it will be, or where it will come from
It’s pretty common, but small surface of application.

The two most common use cases I’ve seen so far:

1. Same as the article example. UI action when AJAX request completes

2. In NodeJS disconnecting from resources (db, redis) after you are done. Otherwise the script will hang and never exit.
I agree, automatic testing would be nice. Unfortunately, I'm the one at work having to do write the said automatic testing of a component that makes parallel DNS requests [1] in an event driven server [2] and need to test that we cover the case where A returns, then B, and B returns, then A, A returns, B returns after our timeout [3], B returns, A returns after our timeout, A returns, B never does, B returns, A never does, while at the same time, making sure the ping tests (the components send a known query to each server to ensure each server is still available [4]) go through because if they don't that particular server will be taken out of rotation. God, I would love to have that automatically tested. What I don't like is having to automate such tests.

[1] To different servers that return different information for a given query. The protocol happens to be DNS.

[2] Based upon poll(), epoll() or kqueue(), depending upon the platform.

[3] We're under some pretty tight time constraints for our product.

[4] DNS, over UDP.
No, thank you.

I had no idea indexing could be used this way. Very cool find.
Remote work: the real estate factor
If the CCP manages to not internally fall apart (which, IMO, it seems like it's not going to) we (US citz) are very much going to see how hilariously China has kicked our ass in the next few decades.
The sad part here is that the Windows Terminal is a pretty old codebase originally written in C.

Most people would consider it fast enough as it is and not worth the effort to optimize/rewrite the rendering part because it would probably lead to marginal gains.

This is something I've heard way too many times, and it always turns wrong by several orders of magnitude.
Please do so. Airports are nothing compares to just I80 across the US. There are a lot of other roads as well that we could downgrade if more people flew.
That's if we can even all agree on how to pronounce "Ganges"! Should it rhyme with cheese or oranges; are the g's hard or soft? In en_GB the first g is hard and the second one soft and the word rhymes with cheese. Oh, and the a is short.

Place names are notoriously tricky. The town I live in is now called Yeovil. It has well over sixty documented spellings since around 500CE. It started off as Gifle - bend in the river. G -> Y is a common Old English/Saxon to modern English thing (-gard and -yard, -burg and -bury, dag or tag and day.) If you squint really hard you can get the rest of the word OK. It was Ival, Givelle, Evil and all sorts of spellings on the way to today. There was also a vowel shift en-route and a generally open approach to spelling.
Modern JSON processor with readable syntax
I don't see why the boom energy has anything to do with the size of the aircraft producing it. It should only depend on the speed of the spike that produces the boom; typically the entire aircraft fits within the sonic boom cone produced by the nose spike when flying straight.

So I suppose an artillery shell, a jet fighter, and a Concorde should produce about the same amount of boom at the same speed of, say, 1.5 M, while flying by.

The engine sound of the aircraft, though, can add significantly to the noise in the wake of the boom cone. Those engines are not low-power or quiet.
So it's alright to increase the price of fuel because yellow_led, personally, thinks too much fuel is being used, but not alright to randomly oppose specific technologies on the grounds that yellow_led, personally, thinks they use too much fuel?

I'm not following your logic. Also I don't know how you randomly oppose specific things.
Why Isn't iTunes Shuffle Random?
There’s a practical maximum amount of thrust to get from a single turboprop engine; to meet performance requirements in the event of the failure of one engine, that puts a practical upper limit on the size of two engine turboprops. Four engine turboprops would likely not be competitive with modern two engine jets, except on the shortest of legs.

Turboprops also fly lower, meaning they’re much more affected by en route weather that turbojets can often climb over. (Low and mid twenties [thousands of feet] is where much of the uncomfortable weather is. Storms that rise into the mid-30s are diverted around by most airplanes.)

Turboprops have their place, but so do jets in air carrier ops.
This reminds me of Pijul and Darcs, which are patch based VCS's, although I'm not sure that's quite what the author of this article has in mind.
An EULA is not a copyright license, nor does it give permission. The practice of EULA comes from Shrink wrap contracts, i.e. a contract that dictate how a product is used after a person have physically bought it. The origin of those are Standard form contracts.

One major difference between copyright law and contract law is that one is defined under international agreement, and the other is defined by each nation. There is no Berne Convention for contracts and EULA's. There is no obligation between nation to recognize EULA "rights".
I feel like this experience is so common it’s almost cliche, but I ended up moving with my family out of the city in mid 2020 mostly due to the major influx of homeless into our neighborhood, which had very little before. I didn’t like my kids facing that every time we walked to the park or the grocery store. There was also a rise in petty crime that made the neighborhood feel a lot less safe.

It’s a tough situation. At the end of the day, mental health shouldn’t fall to any one city to be responsible for, but we have to start somewhere. I hope for the best and that SF can come up with an effective way to help people off the streets.
But if there's no license, it's not the license that restricts but common copyright law.
Manufactured consent.
It's not what the author was talking about, but the title reminded me of perforce changelists. I wish git had something similar. Basically, it's a way to organize and group unrelated changes until you're ready to stash/shelf/commit them.
> I did once manage to get ID based purely on...

In France, though? With their national ID system I wouldn't expect that to work
I don’t enjoy ActivityPub related specs - they give me SOAP vibes - and I’ve struggled with interoperability. (Tried to make my blog act kind of like a Mastodon instance and the learning curve was just way too out there. I’m happy with feeds.)
That more often than not, those in high positions, either in companies or politics, are often clueless about a lot of of things.
Because if you use GPL code, you must release your use/changes under the GPL. That's why the GPL is often called infectious. If copilot spits out GPL code verbatim, the user of the code must respect the license.
It's hardly surprising to see a so-called 'AI system' (If you can even call it that) suggesting and generating broken code. A single typo is enough to confuse it and give you the wrong implementation that won't compile. [0]

The examples all look cherry picked for presentation; but the ones who had access to Copilot early didn't even stress test it, yet it still generated garbage. And it took 1 in 10 tries to get it right. [1]

Of course, we'll hide behind the 'Technical Preview' argument but since the core of this 'AI' (GPT-3) is a black box system, we'll probably never know why it is generating the code it is generating.

[0] https://twitter.com/leifg/status/1411083360756146177

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676845
Please Help Identify This
Commonwealth Fusion Systems
> A primitive form of completion was already implemented on ZX Spectrum (I think): you simply pressed a key and it automatically completed the BASIC command that starting with the corresponding character.

That was more than completion, you were actually entering program tokens directly with no lexing at all. A bit like programming in Scratch today where you're actually building an entire AST visually by snapping blocks together, so you can also dispense with parsing because only certain block shapes will "fit" visibly in a given role.
Yes. Our government should not be in the business of regulating the distribution of a sequence of words about imaginary wizards.

JK is a talented and hard working writer, and though I'm not a fan personally of those books I respect that they likely are great pieces of work, but I believe we are getting the scraps of what we could get in the Intellectually Oppressed world compared to an Intellectually free world. I'd rather have a world without cancer, a world with 100x more people able to provide medical care, a world with less pollution, than a world of artificial scarcity where a few who go along with a system of oppression get to be billionaires.
I think the reaction from software devs on how Copilot's uses their code for ML is interesting in that all the ML companies have been doing this with all other forms of produced content: texts, posts, messages, photo captions, etc. And most likely even less care went into adhering to laws or ethics. Yes code has licenses and thus more distinct legal ramifications but on the other side are people who don't really understand that every time they interact with software or produce some content, everything is gathered and harnessed to power all these companies.