Hacker News Reader

Comment by curiousmindz | Hacker News Reader

I just experimented with the usernames in that video. Most of theme exist (except for "v2v3").

But a lot have barely any repos. There is even a "ferran" who doesn't have anything (public) on GitHub.

So, my guess is that Copilot stored a lot of GitHub accounts, and when we type "@", it autocompletes with any random ones from that list.

There is no relation with the code that it generates.

View on HN

There is no reason to believe that a given username actually exists. "ferran" could even just be a typo in a comment that the model mia-identified as a username.

I think it's more likely the the space of "good" 2-4 phoneme github accounts is almost fully saturated, and the model is good at generating "plausible" real-sounding usernames, leading to a lot of collisions.

> my guess is that Copilot stored a lot of GitHub accounts, and when we type "@", it autocompletes with any random ones from that list.

That’s not how that works and an mis-feature. No one would want a real username from a random list and there’s no reason to think it has a list of usernames somewhere. It for sure generates usernames in real-time the way you would if I told you to imagine a plausible one.

Seriously. It seems there are people out there who somehow think that the Evil Micro$oft made GitHub start publishing a list of all handles just in case it … picks yours?? Would that be useful?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com