What does HackerNews think of copilot?

That feature already exists, you can turn it on here:

https://github.com/settings/copilot

More info:

We built a filter to help detect and suppress the rare instances where a GitHub Copilot suggestion contains code that resembles public code on GitHub. You have the choice to turn that filter on or off during setup. With the filter on, GitHub Copilot checks code suggestions with its surrounding code for matches or near matches (ignoring whitespace) against public code on GitHub of about 150 characters. If there is a match, the suggestion will not be shown to you. In addition, we have announced that we are building a feature that will provide a reference for suggestions that resemble public code on GitHub so that you can make a more informed decision about whether and how to use that code, as well as explore and learn how that code is used in other projects.

https://github.com/features/copilot#what-can-i-do-to-reduce-...

FWIW, there are some (admittedly fairly naive) checks to prevent PII and other sensitive info from being suggested to users. Copilot looks for things like ssh keys, social security numbers, email addresses, etc, and removes them from the suggestions that get sent down to the client.

There's also a setting at https://github.com/settings/copilot (link only works if you've signed up for copilot) that will check any suggestion on the server against hashes of the training set, and block anything that exactly duplicates code in the training set (with a minimum length, so very common code doesn't get completely blocked). Users must choose the value for this setting when they sign up for copilot.

source: I work on copilot at github

There's this https://github.com/settings/copilot

I went here was able to do so: https://github.com/settings/copilot

I'm also late to this article, so maybe this was a bug that was fixed.

Yes, there is an account setting checkbox labeled "Allow GitHub to use my code snippets for product improvements" - https://github.com/settings/copilot

I'm a bit confused how this will work in practice, because I don't see how they can retrain their entire model every time someone toggles that setting.

the URL is broken, it should be https://github.com/settings/copilot