skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m sure this will happen, and there will definitely be instances of the bot giving users bad code, but it would be incredibly difficult to make it solely give out bad code.
> It's not "literally" stealing, because it doesn't deprive anyone of the use the source code.

That's simply not true. You might be confusing idealism about software freedom with how both law and society define theft.

Edit: In this comment I refer to the US.
To be clear: "transformative" not meaning merely "altered" but really meaning "repurposed"; if the new work is something people could feasibly use instead of the old work (harming the author's original market), it isn't "transformative".
> because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that single-family homes were the best option

SFH IS the best options, nobody WANTS to live in an apartment if given the choice.
We used digicert. There is a 50% off link if you Google around for it
Imagine for a second a model of the human brain that consists of three parts. 1) a vector of trillion inputs, 2) a black box, and 3) a vector of trillion outputs. At this level of abstraction, the human brain "pattern matches and replicates" just the same, except it is better at it.
Looks like their own basic interpreter. There's a list of keywords here: https://github.com/James-Livesey/atto/blob/main/commands.js#...

There are some drawing commands, getpixel, etc.
I have worked a bit with transformers, the model underlying GPT. They absolutely learn to copy training data, and that’s perfectly normal.

What is happening here is we’re running into exactly what modern ML is NOT capable of: deductive reasoning. It does not think “I need to query the Twitter API for some posts, then filter them. Right, the API works like this…” No. It doesn’t think at all. It is a regression machine. “This sequence begins/looks like something I have seen before, here’s the corresponding output modulo adaptations.”

ML does not self-reflect, question motives and analyse causes. It’s just a complete lie to suggest otherwise, and to call this “pair programming”? What an absolute joke. It’s a lot like Tesla calling its glorified lane keeping an autopilot.
The Return of the Carry Trade
1. If OO is a poor fit for modern hardware, FP is much, much worse.

2. Actually OO is highly compositional.

3. The few actual studies that have been done disagree on static FP being more expressive (or safer). In fact, if you look at something like Mozart/Oz, they make the case that FP is less expressive.

4. Agree there is no silver bullet. On the other hand, the gentleman who wrote "No Silver Bullet" actually also wrote that he viewed OO as one of the closest shots we have at a silver bullet. And 10 years later wrote that this turned out to be correct.
Unplugged Tesla Model S Plaid Pikes Peak run marks the end of the ICE age
Love the font and colours. Took me right back to the old spectrum days. I assume this was deliberate - good work!
I didn't get the last bit: why author can’t write meaningful commit messages with the merge strategy?
This. There is no need to introduce a new concept like "commit groups" to permeate through everything. Just use merges and display them nicely.

The problem is getting all the visualization tools on the same page.

Bazaar got this right. Their official UI displays a linear history with the ability to expand any merge commit to show the side branch.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bazaar_Explorer_-_Lo...
I can get 250k a year from a unicorn. Why would I apply anywhere else?
There's a lot of sibling commenters disagreeing with this take but I think they miss that ultimately this comes down to how legal experts interpret tech, rather than what tech experts think law should apply.

This is, imo, unfortunate, as often the legal interpretation is based on a gross misunderstanding of how the tech works, but this is the way.

I don't think copilot should be legal according to my own interpretation but in this (rare) case I feel the "IANAL" tag applies not because I lack (legal) knowledge, but rather because I have (tech) knowledge that is likely absent from actual decision making on legal outcomes (therefore leading to different legal outcomes than how I would see things working).
If Vancouver overall is as dense as SF then 4 plexes won't matter much. But there are many other cities - even LA - where I would think it would. Yet LA has vast amount of low rise commercial on 4 lane streets with bus lines that could support widespread 1+5 podium style designed buildings.
From their perspective, they weren't doing anything that abused their privileged position. Tabnine trained their model on open source code, much of which was probably hosted on GitHub. Why should GitHub have to ask permission if tabnine didn't?

Whether training an ML model on code is fair use is still an open question, but I don't think GitHub is a greater villain here than anyone else doing the same thing (at least until they start using private repos).
Dave's Garage – What Is the Fastest Computer Language? 45 Lang. Tested [video]
18k Gold jewelry has been using 18 parts gold, 3 parts copper, and 3 parts silver for a long time.

In theory sure we could probably improve on it, but it works.
It is technically true, but the Arctic World Archive specifically "accepts deposits that are globally significant for the benefit of future generations, as well as information that is significant to your organisation or to you individually" [1]. So it doesn't accept any data (at least as far as I see) and the Github archive should also have met this criteria.

By the way, my initial statement that it may qualify for copyright exemptions turned out to be false for a different reason. They only apply when the library and/or archive in question is open to the public, and the Github Arctic Vault isn't. Thus I think it's actually a Github's generic usage grant in the ToS [2] that allows for the Vault. The Copilot is, of course, very different to anything described in the ToS.

[1] https://arcticworldarchive.org/contribute/

[2] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
Can you expand on this line of thought. I have a gut feeling you are correct based on what I’ve read from Moore, but if you can summarize why he would think this I’d like to see it distilled.
Many space probes exceed their "planned design", some by many more years of activity for example: the official plan is not really what the engineering has been planning.
Yeah, I agree with your point that “if you publish content to the internet, expect it to be used in ways you don’t intend, or even permit.” Just pointing out that a lot of the concerns are not “GitHub is stealing my code for use in Copilot,” but “using GitHub Copilot in my proprietary software is a massive risk/liability.”
For the Greeks, it even had an intelligible meaning

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CE%BB%CE%AD%CE%BE%C...

I think the a- in the al- in Alexander is supposed to be the alpha privative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_privative

like our "ward off" or something.
I write a lot of one or two line functions though.
But that's literally the issue. The only form of intellectual property that is being damaged by this is copyleft.
To be fair I never heard of this and "grosse Lüge" is not unheard of in everyday German. I am surprised there even is a Wikipedia about that.
> nobody cares if my ten-line "how to invert a binary tree" snippet is the same as someone else's.

Maybe nobody cares about that, but the problem is that Github's automated tool is not telling you what code it shows you is actually an exact copy of existing code, or how much of that existing code is being copied, or whether the existing code is licensed, or, if it is licensed, whether your copying is in accordance with the license or not. And without that information you can't possibly know whether what you are doing is legal or ethical. Sure, you could try to guess, but that sort of thing is not supposed to rely on guessing.
> Would you push your code to a service if you knew it could be read by anyone one to ten years from now? Even if you paid to keep it a secret?

I'm old enough to remember when "assume anything you put in cleartext online is public" was received wisdom. We were taught that if you want to keep something private, keep it encrypted on your own local media. Or, failing that, at least on a server you control.
Steve Jobs died from pancreatic cancer. He received a liver transplant, which is not related to that cancer.
> but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me.

No I do not. Even strictly proprietary code can be copied and used in a for-profit way without approval as long as it qualifies for fair use.
> So it tells you that these two parents have been merged together, but it doesn’t tell you which one used to be main. You might guess 8, because it’s the leftmost one, but you don’t know for sure. (Remember, branches in Git are just pointers to commits.) The only way (that I know of) to be sure is to use the reflog, but that is ephemeral: Git occassionally prunes old entries from reflogs.

This feels extremely pedantic to me. There are certainly workflows that produce this confusion, but the most common ones definitely don't.

For the most part, in especially most github-based flows, the 'left-most' (aka `git log --first-parent`) history of the main branch is precisely the history of the main branch, and the "commit groups" are the divergent "right" parents.

Can someone do something that temporarily breaks this? Sure. People `git pull`ing with divergent changes at least used to litter projects' histories with this kind of nonsense. But it's not terribly likely to make it into your main history these days if your upstream repo has a 'protected' main branch, which is so normalized at this point it ought to be considered the default state of affairs.

It seems like maybe the thing the OP really wants is just for the branch name at commit time to be stored as metadata in the commit. That would maybe help with pulling out intentions while looking at history.

Also, Mercurial had a kind of 'hard branch' feature that also might have resembled what's desired here, but as far as I can tell most users of mercurial found it more frustrating than helpful and used plugins that provided looser kinds of branching.
Concert Hall Acoustics
I hate crazy hours! But I wouldn’t go down the VC root and I wouldn’t be trying to create the next Dropbox.
Pretrain GPT-Neo for Open Source GitHub Copilot Model
Is this analogous to gtp-3 reading every sentence ever written without attribution to all of mankind?
there are no recordings from panini's times and panini's texts pertain to grammar. they don't prescribe pronunciation - like precise position of tongue lips etc...
It's been a while since I last thought of this but funny enough I'm on an accessibility project and it made me think of it just as this popped up - I always thought it was a great idea but when I tried it I found it nearly unworkable - probably because I am a really quick typist and not the target audience.

made me think to look at the Dasher homepage https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/WhatsNew.html sad news:

Ada Majorek, who developed Dasher 5.0, sadly passed away in June 2017.

David MacKay sadly passed away on 14th April 2016. This website is being maintained as an archive. Any queries relating to this website archive should be directed to webmaster@inference.org.uk
After 9/11 air travel plateaued for 3–4 years, then afterward rebounded to the original trend line (i.e. massively expanded, and continues to expand).

It doesn’t seem that all of the unpleasant security theater is enough to significantly deter people from flying.
Regardless on how I feel about this usage, I’d be more concerned with the very real possibility of introducing vulnerabilities this way. Say the copilot takes a snippet from a code base. That snippet had a vulnerability and was fixed by the team that understood the what and how. How does that vulnerability get fixed? Does copilot let the user know months later that snippet used actually is very bad and that the company that originally implemented fixed it and you should too?
It’s a really neat experience but I wouldn’t go it again for more than a night. I hit my head on many doorways and am certain that if I’d stayed longer I would have eventually fallen through a wall.
Well, some of us try to keep Facebook and Google out of our private lives, but our faces aren't copyrightable.
Extremely manually.
Genius! You would have blown my teenage mind :P
Looking at the submission history for the domain, you see a point where a few submissions are [dead], and then resume from another account - I suspect that was the point of getting shadow-banned, if I'd had to guess because they only submitted their posts and basically never interacted on the site otherwise. Why that would do long-term "damage" in any way I'm not sure. (And of the course the replacement account doesn't look much better regarding the "don't just self-promote your posts" rule)
The "semi-linear merge" (as Azure DevOps calls it) is our preferred merge approach as well, though reasonable cases can be made for alternative merges depending on circumstance, e.g., an old version hotfix merge into master is of course done as a regular merge.

In addition, if people are feeling charitable, the branch will be cleaned up prior to merge with an interactive rebase to squash out "Wip" commits and hopefully leave a nice clear set of self-contained commits that provide a logically separated view of the work that went into the change.
BPF Theremin, Tetris, and Typewriters (2019) [video]
Agreed. I can't imagine outsourcing monitoring/metrics/etc, despite the mild hassle of maintaining our server of one of the popular options. It requires attention every now and then, like once a year or two, but can be integrated easily with LDAP and our SSO provider.
No problem, definitely let me know when you add it :)...
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 on the line. Unless my recollection is off, the GPL was never the goal of the original Free Software movement; it was merely a tool to get to the end state where all code becomes available for use by anyone for any reason without cost or restriction.

I am reminded of a line from Terry Pratchett's Going Postal in relation to a hacker-like organization called the Smoking GNU, "...[A]ll property is theft, except mine...", which I thought was rather painfully apt in describing what FOSS evolved into after becoming popular.
That creates a mess. It's not clear which remote branches are still active, and can be difficult to link the branches back to the merges historically for hunting bugs.

The best way I've seen by far: Prepare a fast-forward merge, then merge it with --no-ff. You end up with a linear history of commits grouped by the merge commits, can see either view in git log using --first-parent or not, and bisect can find the actual commit when needed.
The predominant domain to use this type of contract is infrastructure construction. I haven’t personally seen it used in software development outside of control systems but I can’t immediately think of reasons why it couldn’t be extended to other domains as well
The Alcubierre drive a mathematical construct and not a real thing that can be built. It was was real then the energy needed to warp space around even a tiny spaceship would destroy the Earth. If their magic space warp drives didn't destroy the Earth they would be warping light's path around them. So we wouldn't see them.

Of all the possibilities for UAPs, super magic propulsion drives are the among the least likely of a number of unlikely explanations.

Cameras are weird and lenses have a lot of weird properties. Autofocus and aperture adjustment add more weirdness. Image sensors have their own weird properties and behaviors. Cameras on stabilized gimbals on a moving aircraft compound all of those properties and effects. That's all on top of the unintuitive nature of looking at things in the sky which often lacks a helpful visual perspective.

So sensor artifacts and co fusing perspective is far far more likely than magic space warp drives.
> So it won't copypaste your code.

You might want to check out this video...

https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
A tiny percentage (less than 1%) [0]of people read terms and conditions- they are long, repetitive and often in legal language. If you expect to read every terms and conditions and privacy policy (and every change there of), you would waste over 240 hours over the year.[1]

[0] Bakos, Y., Marotta-Wurgler, F. and Trossen, D. R. (2014) ‘Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Consumer Attention to Standard-Form Contracts’, The Journal of Legal Studies, 43(1), pp. 1–35. doi: 10.1086/674424.

[1] McDonald, A. M. and Cranor, L. F. (2008) ‘The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies’, A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 4(3), pp. 543–568.
This is typical Microsoft behavior: embrace, extend, and extinguish. They embraced open source with the intention of controlling (GitHub) and exploiting it. And the interesting thing is that many people fell for this already ancient strategy.
> I found an app called "Octal for Hacker News" on App store but it only works with M1 chipset.

Has Apple products always been fragmented like this?
> but the Arctic World Archive specifically...

...provides prime-rate marketing bullshit in its marketing materials

> Thus I think it's actually a Github's generic usage grant in the ToS

If you refer to Section D.4, then:

- Arctic Vault is not "for future generations", but for GitHub only, since that section doesn't permit GitHum to just make copies willy-nilly for anything other than "as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time" and "make backups"

- This specifically makes GitHub "the owner" of that data, and not "some third-party" as you originally suggested
Well, that's a mistake a nonzero amount of the time.

I trust neither, by default.
As a person who plays daily, my understanding is you don't have to feed it any berries (and it will stay there indefinitely until a rival team member knocks your pokemon out by battling).
Sorry for the basic question, but the code one builds on this platform is saved to githubs servers?
I do exactly the same thing - it's all part of the project and system analysis and it helps you neatly sidestep potential pitfalls.

It reminds me of the whole "hero developer" or "hero team" myth; teams who do not do proper analysis, build a turd, but work insane hours stopping the turd falling to pieces.

The people who do that come out looking like heros, when they could have totally avoided the drama in the first place.
Some people think driving a 350Z is already a probable cause.
I'm sure if I saw a 10 primary display sitting next to an RGB one for reference, I could tell a difference. But if it was just sitting there by itself, in regular non-ideal viewing conditions, I doubt I would think that it is significantly better than normal displays. Whereas for high frame rate and high brightness/contrast displays I can easily see a big improvement under normal non-ideal viewing conditions without needing a reference.
Of course I'm not okay with that, but I'm also not disillusioned about my lack of control over the technology in which I've chosen to build my life around. We parasites can't complain really complain that our hosts smell like shit when we're riding them to the bank, can we?

It doesn't HAVE to be like this, it just is, and all of the alternatives suck. If you want to choose to inconvenience yourself in order to pass a morality test that doesn't exist, go ahead I suppose.
An AI isnt learning from it. Its effectively copying prior work when it solves a problem. There is no novel out of bounds data generation by modern ai approaches
I never said every year, as far as I've read into this I still think it's likely to assume that you won't be protected (well) after 10 years. No idea why you think it's a rumor
> Instead it will drive out owners to be replaced by leasers incapable of owning property.

Isn’t that exactly the point? These are the people that can’t afford to live in the city now.
The Maori Vision of Antarctica’s Future
You have more wiggle room when you don't admit your crimes out loud on video.

To avoid discipline, this guy could have said "I just like Taylor Swift" instead of detailing his intent to break the law.
Does this have some kind of distinct result from rebasing the branch before merging does? I'm not thinking of anything that would be different, so I'm not sure if using the more obscure command (`git merge --no-commit` vs `git rebase`) is for a specific reason.
Finally the angle for Microsoft buying GitHub becomes clear.
Generally, yes. It’s not guaranteed to do that correctly, but I’ve not seen it get variable names wrong so far.
I absolutely agree with the gross sentiment —CPU time and bandwidth are expenses that should be argued— but your argument omits two key items: developer time and UX benefit.

In my case, using full-fat Vue lets me do a swathe of complex stuff, pulling in libraries and components we use elsewhere, that also do piles of complex stuff, and it only takes me a couple of hours to progressively enhance a big form, which makes it nicer for the user with pro-active validation, breaking the thing into a wizard, easy dynamic lookups, etc. My work increases conversions, creams KPIs.

Is that worth 30KB? Every day of the week.

Can I batter it down to 20KB? Probably, but it'll take me at least twice as long this time, possibly make the work output less reusable and cost the client twice as much. Is that 10KB worth it? Maybe, maybe not.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not the sort of person who throws JS everywhere. I'm a Django developer who will always push to SSR over SPAs... But I also realise there is occasionally a business case for a but of reasoned splurging. Again, my hope is that within a couple of years tree-shaking gets good enough to automate this nonsense, trim out everything that isn't used.
You said "like the flu". That means every year.
If so, that is horrible behaviour on their part.
Hardware increases of speed began to slow down 20 years ago and people are still using software that is 50x slower than the fastest possible technology. If this alone was going to kill slow languages one would suppose it would have already done so.

The arguable shift that is more significant is not about hardware its hopefully about newer languages like Rust making this performance cost less in terms of safety and development time which is a more recent development.
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks – story of a whistleblower
Well, we are talking about many killings in a single location over a relatively short period of time. We are also specifically dealing with a historic artefact that symbolizes these killings. Pointing out how bizarre this is, according to today's standards, is not pointless as far as I'm concerned. It serves to remind us of a more primitive past and of how far we've come.

Agree to disagree then. Seems like a perfectly reasonable observation to me.
> the issue is an AI regurgitating the lines of copyrighted code verbatim. To be clear, humans aren't allowed to do this either.

That's a little broad. There's a wide range of licenses for software that explicitly allow precisely this.
Yeah we need to work through all the issues this exposes. It’s going to be complicate and messy but it’s been inevitable for a long time.
> you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to […] reproduce Your Content […] as permitted through GitHub' functionality

If you upload code to GitHub, you grant them (and every GitHub user) a license to do exactly what Copilot does.

This ToS change happened 2017, and I actually had to get approval from all contributors of my projects to accept to the changed ToS: https://github.com/justjanne/QuasselDroid-ng/issues/5

What GitHub’s doing is shady, but it’s been obvious it was going to happen for years.