skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Should I agree with this guy if I believe all software should be open-source? I don't think snippets of code have copyright strength; we pass them around constantly in Slack chatrooms, IRC and Stackoverflow...
>It is certainly fascinating to see people start running away from "information wants to be free" and other Free Software principles full tilt when, all of a sudden, it's their livelihoods that are suddenly on the line.

Indeed. Everybody is a leet haxors when they're 14, it's 1998, and we're vying for +o in #warez on DALnet. We believed information really did "want to be free".

Unfortunately some of those same kids grew up to create today's data barons and that old saying about getting someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding comes into play.
git bisect already supports --first-parent: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-bisect
It seems to me like an anti-pattern to have a time series where the identity is formed by (device,location,firmware version,sensor). It seems to me like (device,location,sensor) is fine identity for an original of, presumably, real-valued time series data, while (device,location,firmware) is a good identity for, I guess, a string-valued time series, and if you really needed to get sensor data aggregated by firmware version you'd do a join in this rare and in my opinion highly contrived case.
I fail on interviews every single time, since 2004; therefore I gave up trying out of painful disappointment, it's just not worth it anymore.

I'm not the type of person that knows how to handle stressful tests or whiteboards during interviews.

I respond rapidly out of sheer panic and anxiety, but in reality I am a very slow thinker; I need my time to read something multiple times until I see the whole picture inside my mind, like literally!

9 out of 10 times I first design a whole visual pattern inside my head, test it with every possible combination to validate its logic, and then I implement it in code.

I had been like that since I was born, so...yeah.

I never liked theory or limited time to write tests or exams as I didn't have the time span to visualize my answers so I can express myself the best.

The least I can do is to use my time and keep my head spinning by using programming as leisure and learn new things or read advanced books on topics I'm interested in the most.
I'm glad the post showed up because I've been in the hospital for 3 days and I was like HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THIS? ;)
I never got a flu shot, I was not aware that I was implying a time frame here. Point taken
Building an app to help me with my stiff neck
You can say both, you know. That it serves a purpose and is too strong.

And I notice you didn't say anything about patents?
I have a genuine question about this whole thing with Copilot:

A similar product, TabNine, has been around for years. It does essentially the exact same thing as Copilot, it’s trained on essentially the same dataset, and it gets mentioned in just about every thread on here that talks about AI code generation. (It’s a really cool product btw and I’ve been using and loving it for years). According to their website they have over 1M active users.

Why is this suddenly a huge big deal and why is everyone suddenly freaking out about Copilot? Is it because it’s GitHub and Microsoft and OpenAI behind Copilot vs some small startup you’ve never heard of? Is it just that the people freaking out weren’t paying attention and didn’t realize this service already existed?
Scale, intent and impact do actually matter in copyright. Copying a single API can be ok, and copying a million of them might not be OK. There's a reason for the word "fair" in "fair use".

If a whole project was copied verbatim and the license violated I think everyone would agree that was wrong. So then is copying the same quantity of code across 1000 projects wrong?

Is setting up a process and a system that does that systematically, at scale with intent and then commercialises the result wrong?
It always frustrates me when techies have an irreverence for Steve Jobs, or let his brashness overshadow the value he bestowed upon the world.

Jobs was once asked what distinguishes the ordinary from the great, and he said it boils down to "taste". he also described his job as being "an editor".

instead of adding more and more, he decided what to sacrifice and what to focus on making great. that's a rare quality, especially in tech.
The article is worth reading, but a good summary is at the bottom:

> This investigation demonstrates that GitHub Copilot can quote a body of code verbatim, but that it rarely does so, and when it does, it mostly quotes code that everybody quotes, and mostly at the beginning of a file, as if to break the ice.

But there’s still one big difference between GitHub Copilot reciting code and me reciting a poem: I know when I’m quoting. I would also like to know when Copilot is echoing existing code rather than coming up with its own ideas. That way, I’m able to look up background information about that code, and to include credit where credit is due.

The answer is obvious: sharing the prefiltering solution we used in this analysis to detect overlap with the training set. When a suggestion contains snippets copied from the training set, the UI should simply tell you where it’s quoted from. You can then either include proper attribution or decide against using that code altogether.

This duplication search is not yet integrated into the technical preview, but we plan to do so. And we will both continue to work on decreasing rates of recitation, and on making its detection more precise.
If that's true they should spend more on cyber security given all the ransomware attacks.
> It it's actually open source without commercial restrictions though, I don't see an ethical difference in using the code directly or for an meta analysis driving ML for enhanced code completion.

Most Open Source code comes with a requirement to carry over license note, which Copilot does not do. Additionally, ethics dictate you attribute the source when copying directly, something the Copilot also doesn't do.
There is zero rationale why Microsoft could not do it without buying GitHub. Hell, they could have trained the model from GitLab or Bitbucket public repos.

They need developer mindshare and they lost a lot of developers in the 2000s. Buying GitHub (and being involved in 100s of projects) brings this mindset of Microsoft as a developer company back to developers. Like as an advertisement platform/branding for some novel technology like this CoPilot.
Anything pasted or typed into that Copilot editor is sent to GitHub as 'telemetry'.

> In order to generate suggestions, GitHub Copilot transmits part of the file you are editing to the service.

So Yes.
This was my experience working at Google. Very liberal until you start talking about upzoning, then suddenly "some neighborhoods should keep their character".
> we can’t prove or disprove these links

Then the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim that these links exist. Until then, they functionally don’t exist from an outside perspective.
Same as the rest of the fields. Assisting in identification.

Which I suppose is a controversial opinion, now.
Not really. Back when free software was strong, it would have been a good thing for society since Microsoft was selling software in boxes on actual store shelves.

Now 'the edge' is already mostly open source. All the lock-in and value has moved into either infrastructure or in software you don't even get to touch since it runs in the Cloud and you just provide IO to it.
If you want to see a very bad example of a broken search engine, use the Google voice Assistant to search for "how many raccoons can fit"
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right , to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

What better way to promote said Progress than by making sure said Authors and Inventors can make enough money off their work to keep doing it? As written, it's a roundabout way to get at the instrumentality of capital, but if that's not what they had in mind then I'm not sure what they were getting at. Without copyright, a creator's rights to their own work aren't diminished; it's just that everyone else's are expanded to the same level.

(I'd love to know if I'm way off base about this. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm sure it's been discussed to death.)

> Honestly, I rather like this whole question of copilot. I solidly appreciate the brilliance of github as a honeypot.

I think it's really cool, and I'd probably use it myself. As much as my favorite kinds of programming (e.g. writing experimental text editors) might not benefit from it, in my day job I sure would love to spend less time filling in boilerplate and looking up mundane API details.

I don't mean to single Github out in my mention of big corporations benefiting from copyright law. Scraping vast quantities of copyrighted data to build new products is a common business model at this point, and--like other new IP-related paradigms enabled by modern information technology--I think it deserves a fresh look, being mindful of just what it is we're trying to accomplish with copyright law. As you say, it's not always obvious, even in written law.
This article is nonsense. The whole premise is based on a badly designed schema.
Uh, how about a disclaimer that this analysis is made /by Github/?
I think that single family housing, especially in cities dealing with lack of availability, likely needs to go. And other changes need to be made on top of that. But, assuming we were able to replace single family housing with 3 or 4 plexes, where does that leave home ownership?

I'm concerned the transformation of single family homes to apartments would just present another opportunity wealth and property to move from private owners to conglomerated investment or the rich. Personally, my best experiences have always been renting with private owners, so if people have to rent in the future, hopefully they aren't stuck doing so from a comparatively small number of management companies that control the market.
10 Minute read on starting up a vending business
What’ll you learn :
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The top five Vending Machine business truths
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Where will I find my stock to fill the machine?
Successful stories

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TenMinuteStartup/issues/ten-minute-startup-issue-1-vending-machines-670509
Well a public repo can be cloned. And needs to be replicated in CDNs etc.

Is not that reproduction?
Ahh the worse diet for the environment.

Seems fitting for Jobs.
> have a lot of open source code that I love to share for things like education or private stuff, but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me. If you can suck all the code without even I noticing it, that's not fair

Co-pilot aside, that's already how it works today. If you make something open source, I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you. It's great when companies give back to open source, either by supporting the projects they depend on, or by open sourcing their own internal projects, but it's not obligatory.

If you don't want people to independently profit from your code, don't release it under a license that allows commercial use
>> I am not belittling the work going in this space, and I’m sure for highly constrained and narrow use cases a lot can be done even now.

No. Program synthesis approaches work very well for a broad array of problems, not for "highly constrained and narrow use cases"- that is a misconception of the kind that results from lack of familiarity with modern program synthesis.

Here's a good recent review of the field:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Sumit Gulwani, that I mentioned in my previous comment, is an author. To clarify, I'm not in any way affiliated with him or his collaborators. I'm actually from a rival camp, if you will, but the paper I link to is a very good summary of the state of the art. It should help you if you wish to understand where program synthesis is at.

>> I said program synthesis good enough to replace programmers requires AGI. Program synthesis based off of informal specifications in natural language.

Program synthesis from natural language is hard to make work because it's difficult to translate natural language specifications to specifications that a program synthesiser can use. But that is a limitation of current natural language analysis, specifically natural language understanding, approaches - not a limitation of program syhtesis approaches.

I think you equate formal specifications, or specification by example, with "narrow use cases". There's no connection between the two.
From what he wrote, it sounds like he discussed his plans for the day with the breakfast butler, and they were able to infer based on his discussed plans what he would need (including a map with the route that they talked about marked). I also don't like to be bothered, but that would be fine enough by me.
Because if it's somebody that has to push boundaries it's not the plebs it's trillion dollar companies.
Github is just the begining, they will crawl any open source code, crawling npm, pypi, cpan, public gitlab...

If your code is open source, they will get it.

That's kinda the point of open source.
That seems really dumb since they have a well formalised system for people to declare their licenses. Even if people have shown isolated incidents of it, I'm still sceptical (for example, maybe someone put AGPL headers into a project they explicitly licensed MIT in their main license file etc).
There's no contradiction between only agriculture at 10% and agriculture, forestry and other land use at 24%.
So when MS does it it's evil, but it's perfectly fine for everyone else to do it?

I also don't see how any of this follows - they could've just crawled GitLab or any other OSS repository. They didn't even need Github for this.

Heck, is OpenAI doing embrace, extend, and extinguish on the entire web now, because they use Common Crawl [0] to train GTP-3, which forms the basis of CoPilot?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Crawl
it's just what the community does these days, bored and have to be upset about something, and being upset at big companies is trendy
> Nobody prosecutes the CIA/GRU/PRC for coercing others to spy.

Except for expulsion of diplomats, arrests of agents, sanctions against government officials, indictments for officials and agents, and of course war.

Besides all of those things that happen all the time nobody prosecutes spy agencies. eyeroll

Assange is a self-styled spymaster that's not actually very good at the job. Spies that go around advertising their spying and bragging about conspiracies of which they are a part are not good spies.
Whether or not formal methods can be applied is almost entirely an economic decision since that kind of rigor drives up cost. Makes sense in certain high value systems when the organization wrapped around them has the resources or the level of risk associated with a less rigorous approach is too high (e.g. at NASA).

What the author seems to miss completely is that there are many systems developed using typical methodologies that generate billions in revenue. What this tells you is that ideas like TLA+ are effectively superfluous in a wide variety of software contexts.
Human brains are at least minimally recurrent, and are trained on data sets that are much wider and more complex than what we are handing GPT-3. I have done all of these standard though experiments and even developed and trained my own neural networks back before there were libraries that have allowed people to "dabble" in machine learning: if you consider the implications of humans being able to execute turing complete thoughts it should be come obvious that the human brain isn't merely doing pattern-anything... it sometimes does, but you can't just conflate them and then call it a day.
I think the product is pretty cool, but I wish it had been announced by GitLab instead so there would be less of this brouhaha.
I used to admire GitHub for being a fully bootstrapped company and free to pursue a path in the world they believed in as a company.

Since the Microsoft acquisition it’s becoming painfully obvious how unhealthily centralized the dev world has become, and they seem to strive to become ever more entrenched in the name of maximizing shareholder value.

I only have a small amount of open source projects on GH but I intend to vote with my feet and abandon the platform by self-hosting Gitea. By itself it won’t be a big splash but I’m inspired by posts such as this and I hope to inspire someone else in turn. Of all people we devs should be able to find good ways to decentralize.
You can be as dishonest as you like, and I will call you on it each time.

I specifically cited ammonia and hydrogen as examples that may someday take over the storage load from the immediately viable alternatives I listed. (BTW, Ammonia is, in fact, not "just the storage mechanism for hydrogen", but is rather the heir apparent to bunker fuel for shipping. An industrial-scale electric ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. We will need just 1000 more of them to fuel all shipping.)

Underground compressed air does, in fact, get excellent insulation from the earth packed around it. Underwater compressed air does not, in fact, need insulation, because it may absorb heat from the water on its way out.

There is no need for air compression to become 1000x cheaper than at present. Air compression is mature technology. It only needs 1000x bigger capacity, achieved simply by scaling up well-understood technology. There is no need for air liquification to become 1000x cheaper. It is already mature, and efficient. It just needs to be scaled up, as we see occurring.
Yeah totally! Some of the ideas from openEXR seem like they could help a lot here! Of course there's nothing stopping ppl from storing not-linear pixel values in whatever color space you like in an exr file, but at least the format can do a reasonable job of recording metadata about this, so that it can still hopefully still be linearized on load.

I think it's worth noting here that linearizing-after-load is often not good enough, since the renderer most often has already automatically filtered (think MIP pyramid/etc) the texture values by the time you get hold of them. You always want the values in a linear color space (gamma=1.0) during filtering. Some renderers try to support this so you can load a jpeg without thinking about it too hard but myself I would prefer to include an explicit linearization step for extra control and peace of mind. You may end up wanting to use a specific LUT to linearize with for example, and the errors that creep in if gamma is not 1.0 can be quite subtle and hard to put your finger on, but can really sap photorealism in a nasty way.
Because the repository trusted by millions is starting to do things we never anticipated. It's growing in ways that are a touch uncomfortable for some.

I think some are also beginning to feel an Amazonification happening. We built all the stuff and made it free, but now a company is going to own it and profit off of it.

Edit: If we want to prevent this, we need a new license that states our code may not be included in deep learning training sets.

Edit 2: if private repository code is in this training set, it may be possible to leak details of private company infrastructure. Models can leak training data.
Check out sourcehut!

https://sourcehut.org/
And they said Python 2 ⇒ 3 was difficult ;)

Unfortunately the major blocker (for me) is the lack of IE11 support and the bloody paying customers who refuse to move off IE11. One day they'll be gone.
Once again, Stallman (will have been) right.

Github/Microsoft is going to take your code, and then cut off your access to it. This is what the GPL was designed to fight, so they're going to try it this way instead.

Those who do not learn history yadda yadda.
Yes. For example, arfa ran into this question when launching https://thisfursonadoesnotexist.com/. Lots of furry artists had exactly the same concerns with his work there, but that work is decisively transformative.

Copilot seems ... well, less transformative. I'm still not sure how to feel.
Microsoft being Microsoft.
I can't speak to whether or not Richard Stallman was trying to make some 4-dimensional chess move to remove software restrictions by adding software restrictions when he wrote the GPL back in the 80s, but his original intentions are irrelevant in most cases since most people who license their code under the GPL do not consult with him or consider his opinions when they choose to do so.
I’d argue that this new use case is very interesting to open source and how it relates to the various licenses, and not necessarily “the point of open source”.

I can imagine people being OK with their code being used as-is, and/or being modified, but not used completely out of context to train some corporate AI to inject code into commercial code based.
If you insist the term "owner" for copyright grants, you have a faulty understanding of copyright. The terms of service, much like software license, only allows for the licensee to do some specific things (in this case, including backups) under certain circumstances agreed upon in advance. Copyright assignment, which is akin to the ownership transfer, is much harder.

> This specifically makes GitHub "the owner" of that data, and not "some third-party" as you originally suggested

This one is my fault though, I've used the "Arctic Vault" as an archival site, but as I later realized it is a Github's archive stored in the Arctic World Archive. So yeah, it's (only) Github that can retrieve the data.
You just keep running into BS when it comes to supporting Safari. It’s the only browser I’m aware of that’s still maintained that has WebAssembly support but doesn’t support streaming. It’s been years. Not to mention terribly lagging support for free formats. I’ve heard the argument over and over that Safari is good because it’s one of the main remaining contenders to Chrome, but as an iOS user, I’m just about done using Apple products on the whole due to Safari alone. It really does feel like the modern Internet Explorer; that thing you have to support that is consistently worse than its peers. And I don’t even want to bother with its extension ecosystem.

edit: To be clear: I get not supporting ridiculous stuff like WebMIDI or WebBluetooth and maybe more obscure WebAudio features. But not supporting free formats? Not supporting WASM streaming, regex features, lagging on object insertion order for years? Safari feels like it only ever follows standards begrudgingly.
Interestingly, the basic CLOAD and CSAVE instructions (load and save to tape) could perhaps be implemented most easily. You don't need anything other than the simple file handling you get in all browsers, via "open" and "save" dialogs.