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Fibonacci Number Certificates

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/02/05/fibonacci-certificate/
1•y1n0•1m ago•0 comments

AI Overviews are killing the web search, and there's nothing we can do about it

https://www.neowin.net/editorials/ai-overviews-are-killing-the-web-search-and-theres-nothing-we-c...
2•bundie•6m ago•0 comments

City skylines need an upgrade in the face of climate stress

https://theconversation.com/city-skylines-need-an-upgrade-in-the-face-of-climate-stress-267763
3•gnabgib•7m ago•0 comments

1979: The Model World of Robert Symes [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmDxmxhrGDc
1•xqcgrek2•11m ago•0 comments

Satellites Have a Lot of Room

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/02/02/satellites-have-a-lot-of-room/
2•y1n0•12m ago•0 comments

1980s Farm Crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_farm_crisis
3•calebhwin•12m ago•1 comments

Show HN: FSID - Identifier for files and directories (like ISBN for Books)

https://github.com/skorotkiewicz/fsid
1•modinfo•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Holy Grail: Open-Source Autonomous Development Agent

https://github.com/dakotalock/holygrailopensource
1•Moriarty2026•25m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Minecraft Creeper meets 90s Tamagotchi

https://github.com/danielbrendel/krepagotchi-game
1•foxiel•32m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Termiteam – Control center for multiple AI agent terminals

https://github.com/NetanelBaruch/termiteam
1•Netanelbaruch•32m ago•0 comments

The only U.S. particle collider shuts down

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/particle-collider-shuts-down-brookhaven
2•rolph•35m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Why do purchased B2B email lists still have such poor deliverability?

1•solarisos•35m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Remotion directory (videos and prompts)

https://www.remotion.directory/
1•rokbenko•37m ago•0 comments

Portable C Compiler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_C_Compiler
2•guerrilla•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Kokki – A "Dual-Core" System Prompt to Reduce LLM Hallucinations

1•Ginsabo•40m ago•0 comments

Software Engineering Transformation 2026

https://mfranc.com/blog/ai-2026/
1•michal-franc•41m ago•0 comments

Microsoft purges Win11 printer drivers, devices on borrowed time

https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/printers/microsoft-stops-distrubitng-legacy-v3-and-v4-pr...
3•rolph•41m ago•1 comments

Lunch with the FT: Tarek Mansour

https://www.ft.com/content/a4cebf4c-c26c-48bb-82c8-5701d8256282
2•hhs•45m ago•0 comments

Old Mexico and her lost provinces (1883)

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77881/pg77881-images.html
1•petethomas•48m ago•0 comments

'AI' is a dick move, redux

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2026/note-on-debating-llm-fans/
5•cratermoon•49m ago•0 comments

The source code was the moat. But not anymore

https://philipotoole.com/the-source-code-was-the-moat-no-longer/
1•otoolep•49m ago•0 comments

Does anyone else feel like their inbox has become their job?

1•cfata•49m ago•1 comments

An AI model that can read and diagnose a brain MRI in seconds

https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/ai-model-can-read-and-diagnose-brain-mri-seconds
2•hhs•53m ago•0 comments

Dev with 5 of experience switched to Rails, what should I be careful about?

2•vampiregrey•55m ago•0 comments

AlphaFace: High Fidelity and Real-Time Face Swapper Robust to Facial Pose

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16429
1•PaulHoule•56m ago•0 comments

Scientists discover “levitating” time crystals that you can hold in your hand

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2026/february/scientists-discover--levitating--t...
3•hhs•58m ago•0 comments

Rammstein – Deutschland (C64 Cover, Real SID, 8-bit – 2019) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VReIuv1GFo
1•erickhill•58m ago•0 comments

Tell HN: Yet Another Round of Zendesk Spam

5•Philpax•59m ago•1 comments

Postgres Message Queue (PGMQ)

https://github.com/pgmq/pgmq
1•Lwrless•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Django-rclone: Database and media backups for Django, powered by rclone

https://github.com/kjnez/django-rclone
2•cui•1h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Introduction to the concept of likelihood and its applications (2018)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2515245917744314
71•sebg•3mo ago

Comments

pkoird•3mo ago
Perhaps it was due to English not being my primary language, but it took me an embarrassing amount of time to learn that probability and likelihood are different concepts. Concretely, we talk about probability of observing a data given an underlying assumption (model) is true while we talk about the likelihood of the model being true given we observe some data.
qwertytyyuu•3mo ago
Nah, that’s not a non native English thing, i think non maths background native people would make the same mistake
MiscCompFacts•3mo ago
I’m native speaker and I thought they were the same. Still unsure of the difference. I guess I need to study this.
nerdponx•3mo ago
The likelihood function returns a probability. Specifically it tells you, for some parametric model, how the joint probability of the data in your data set varies as a function of changing the parameters in the model.

If that sentence doesn't make sense, then it's helpful to just write out the likelihood function. You will notice that that it is in fact just the joint probability density of your model.

The only thing that makes it a "likelihood function" is that you fix the data and vary the parameters, whereas normally probability is a function of the data.

voidhorse•3mo ago
Yeah, it was a poor choice of nomenclature, since, in common, nontechnical parlance, "probable" and "likely" are very close semantically. Though I'm not sure which came first, the choice of "likelihood" for the mathematical concept or the casual use of "likely" as more or less synonymous with probable.
nerdponx•3mo ago
My guess was always that "probability" came first, and they needed a different word for "likelihood" when the latter concept became formalized.
wiz21c•3mo ago
But the article makes it crystal clear (I had never seen it explained so clearly!):

"For conditional probability, the hypothesis is treated as a given, and the data are free to vary. For likelihood, the data are treated as a given, and the hypothesis varies."

WaitWaitWha•3mo ago
The way I read this (and my layman understading) probability is about predicting future events, given a known model or assumption, while likelihood is almost the mirror image: I observe the data/outcome, and I ask: given that data, how plausible is a certain model or parameter value?

Another way of looking at it:

probability: parameter/model is fixed; outcome is random/unknown.

likelihood: outcome/data is fixed; we vary the parameter/model to assess how well it explains the data.

qjh•3mo ago
It's actually almost exactly the other way around.

The probability of a model M given data X, or P(M|X) is the posterior probability. The likelihood of data X given model M, or P(X|M), is the probability (or probability density, depending on whether your data is continuous or discrete) of observing data X given model M. We often are given un-normalised likelihoods, which is what the linked paper talks about. These quantities are related via Bayes' Theorem.

Now, you may ask, isn't the probability of observing data X given model M still a probability? I mean, yeah, a properly normalized likelihood is indeed a probability. It's not the mirror image of probability, it is just an un-normalised probability (or a probability distribution) of data given a model or model parameters.