frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/30/github_copilot_ads_pull_requests/
78•_____k•1h ago

Comments

aurareturn•1h ago
Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.

I'm pro-AI adoption but the way Microsoft distastefully forces Copilot into everything is how you get people to hate AI.

I’m guessing product teams are told by upper management to AI-fy every product they own. Teams are then rushed to just get something out there whether they make sense or not.

gib444•21m ago
> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats.

Microsoft will always be a company that pushes things on people rather than building things that attract people. It's in their DNA.

Animats•1h ago
Microsoft will probably try to sneak it back in later. They've done that with other intrusions.

Migrating away from Github just increased in priority.

computerfriend•51m ago
https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573353.

verdverm•28m ago
Did you mean to link the parent HN comment from someone on the copilot team?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233

yosamino•58m ago
Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means.

They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people.

This really is the quote of the century:

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads

What a waste.

altmanaltman•55m ago
A lot of amazing technology has been invented just for the purpose of killing people. It's nothing new. Humans are monkeys that like to kill other monkeys and no amount of civilization will change that.
logdu•42m ago
It certainly won't change with that kind of attitude. Don't you want to live a peaceful life and be free from your baser instincts? I believe most people do, and if they don't, the mission of those who have education and means should be to show the way in that direction, instead of shrugging off the worst things and excusing them on "monkeys", which IMO is insulting to monkeys.
shevy-java•57m ago
The problem is that Microslop is not THINKING. What is the point of inserting ads? That just increases the spam output. Sure, Microslop may think this helps boost their revenue but many people hate ad-spam. After I started to use ublock origin, there was no way back to the unsafe ads-down-the-turtles approach anymore. Ads waste people's time and money.
verdverm•29m ago
perhaps they forgot to set thinking mode in the LLM payload
scbrg•57m ago
"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now."

-- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

Ygg2•23m ago
Thinking of megacorps as anything other than slimy, amoral, scum honestly requires superhuman levels of mental gymnastics.
lynx97•20m ago
Does it matter these days if a company or administration are "the good guys"? Does "good" even have a meaning anymore? The "good" part of the world rotates in disbelief since Trump was re-elected in a democratic vote. Everyone says Microsoft is evil, since, what, the 90s?! But still, Windows is everywhere. Is anyone still buying this moral bullshit? "Goodness" obviously has no majority.
saaspirant•19m ago
Relevant thread

"Microsoft acquires Github" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

altmanaltman•57m ago
> Hearing feedback from the community following Manson's post and the kerfuffle it generated, Rogers said, has helped him realize that "on reflection," letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call."

Thankfully, they need the community feedback to realize it was wrong. It was so hard to guess it was wrong without the feedback! It's good to know these people are in charge of building Copilot.

verdverm•30m ago
Would be cool if they listened to us about the top voted feedback of all time, re: when the destroyed the feed

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188

pjc50•26m ago
> letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge

Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.

scott_w•15m ago
I haven’t seen it but the article makes it sound like, when you ask for it to make a change to your code, that’s the point it puts the ad in.

I think (but not 100% sure) that it also puts it directly into your codebase, without you knowing ahead of time, without your permission. If that’s correct then it’s truly heinous.

kakacik•19m ago
This is corporate PR speak 101, external or internal doesn't matter. None of that sentence is true and everybody knows that.

Its just a theatre since other peers are dancing the same dance and they can't stick out as too rough or honest or whatever. Of course they realized this very well from the start, weighted risk of backfiring, reward for meeting some fucked up quarterly or yearly objective set by higher ups and decided to go ahead.

You can safely ignore the words, just make a mental mark that this is/are sociopathic assholes, move on with life and leave the mark there for next 4 decades and act according to that knowledge the next time you deal with them or their products, if you have to.

synack•48m ago
Yet Sourceforge has been putting ads on open source projects for decades.
kadoban•26m ago
Yeah, that's part of why nobody wants to use Sourceforge.
aquir•45m ago
I would be curious what Raycast’s reaction is. They just got caught in the crossfire or they deliberately bought ads to be placed with Copilot
staindk•27m ago
Doubt Raycast would have known about this, think they are smarter than that. But who knows.
kadoban•24m ago
I'm sure they sold this ad space at a premium and someone over there thought it was a brilliant idea. How else would it have happened?
VadimPR•14m ago
They posted previously on YN that they too were caught offguard. The 'tips' weren't specific to Raycast, they've been going on for a while and Raycast was just one product it decided to feature now.
Dansvidania•44m ago
the microsoft playbook
plagiarist•38m ago
First of all, I find it enraging that dimwitted AI companies decided to edit PR descriptions for anything at all.
etiennebausson•27m ago
Wouldn't it change the hash, making push requests conflict in many case?
heipei•32m ago
I just saw the headline fly by yesterday and thought that this was just another dumb bug in what is the slow decline of GitHub. To find out today that this was very much intentional is even worse.
ozim•29m ago
Exactly same for me.

If I think about it, that was in my head accounted as „no one would be that stupid”.

akmarinov•25m ago
Remember when they wanted to charge for self hosted runners and “backed down”, let’s see how long it lasts
devsda•20m ago
So, after Windows cleanup announcement nobody at Github thought "may be we should review all our copilot integrations to avoid another embarrassment for MS" ?

That shows either it was just a Windows org announcement and not a culture change at MS or it was just an empty promise to temporarily deflect mounting criticism.

Either way it is disappointment for anyone who thought it was a genuine case of introspection and change of heart at MS.

Show HN: TaskTrace, a local-first activity log that gives LLMs context

https://tasktrace.com
1•warrenronsiek•3m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Claudebase: Sync your Claude Code env across machines via GitHub

https://github.com/rohithzr/claudebase
1•rohithazra•8m ago•0 comments

Human TODO

https://humantodo.dev/
1•pramodbiligiri•9m ago•0 comments

YouTube chat logs reveal employees aimed for "viewer addiction" and scrapped

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtube-chat-logs-reveal-employees-aimed-for-viewer-addiction-and...
2•latein•12m ago•1 comments

Freedom is the only thing that matters. Living freely. Creating freely

2•kaizenb•12m ago•1 comments

With Mythos will we reach coding singularity?

1•kamalsrini17•13m ago•0 comments

Memopt – GPU memory infrastructure for AI clusters

https://memopt.com/
1•lachu_536•15m ago•0 comments

2026 has been the most pivotal year in my career and it's only March

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2026/03/29/
2•x591•16m ago•0 comments

Shor's algorithm is possible with as few as 10k reconfigurable atomic qubits

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28627
2•ipnon•17m ago•0 comments

Vaping likely to cause cancer, new Australian review of evidence finds

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/591096/vaping-likely-to-cause-cancer-new-australian-review-of-ev...
3•abawany•20m ago•0 comments

Q4_0 KV cache collapses 92.5% at 64K on DGX Spark GB10 (unified memory paradox)

https://github.com/Memoriant/dgx-spark-kv-cache-benchmark
1•memoriant•21m ago•0 comments

Don't sleep on your feedback infrastructure

https://www.lumeforms.com/audit
1•Akhilm6•21m ago•1 comments

Scientists uncovered the nutrients bees were missing – Colonies surged 15-fold

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/03/260327000518.htm
4•apparent•24m ago•0 comments

Good CTE Bad CTE

https://boringsql.com/posts/good-cte-bad-cte/
2•x591•25m ago•0 comments

Claude Code v2.1.88 Sourcemap

https://unpkg.com/@anthropic-ai/claude-code@2.1.88/cli.js.map
2•PashKatel•27m ago•0 comments

How the Apple II created the core of personal computing

https://www.theverge.com/tech/900677/apple-ii-personal-computer
3•rbanffy•29m ago•0 comments

Write Native Web HTML and CSS for Roblox UI

https://twitter.com/xeno_mouse/status/2038759250453729685
1•bloxstack•33m ago•0 comments

Windows++: C++ Application Framework for Windows by Paul DiLascia

http://pauldilascia.com/wpp.htm
1•teleforce•45m ago•0 comments

A rational non-commutative 4×4x48 matrix multiplication algorithm

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18699
1•vulcanology•47m ago•0 comments

Hand-Drawn Style in PowerPoint

https://pptcrafter.wordpress.com/2019/09/24/hand-drawn-style-in-powerpoint/
2•teleforce•50m ago•0 comments

Corebot 26.03 released with Intel PantherLake support

https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2026/03/30/coreboot-26-03-release/
1•cromka•50m ago•0 comments

A group of flamingoes is called a 'flamboyance'

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/03/30/flamingos-pink/
2•sparshselim•52m ago•0 comments

The Contribution Theatre Trap

https://www.nyn.me/blog/last-mile-fallacy
1•codevenn•53m ago•0 comments

Seeds of doubt:The dark side of an Italian energy giant's green jet fuel promise

https://www.politico.eu/article/seeds-of-doubt-the-dark-side-of-enis-green-jet-fuel-promise/
3•leonidasrup•1h ago•0 comments

Sandflare – I built a sandbox that launches AI agent VMs in ~300ms

2•ajaysheoran2323•1h ago•2 comments

We Used to Think Everybody Heard a Voice Inside Their Heads – But We Were Wrong

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-used-to-think-everybody-heard-a-voice-inside-their-heads-but-we-w...
2•Anon84•1h ago•1 comments

EchoMind – AI Voice Notes

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echomind-ai-voice-notes/id6760428216
1•srsstyle•1h ago•0 comments

Office, Messaging and Verbs (2015)

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-messaging-and-verbs
2•simonebrunozzi•1h ago•0 comments

Pgit: I Imported the Linux Kernel into PostgreSQL

https://oseifert.ch/blog/linux-kernel-pgit
2•ImGajeed76•1h ago•0 comments

Cape Town Seeks to Emulate India's High-End Outsourcing Push

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-31/cape-town-seeks-to-emulate-india-s-high-end-ou...
5•alephnerd•1h ago•0 comments