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What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00238-z
1•beardyw•4m ago•0 comments

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
1•taubek•4m ago•0 comments

OldMapsOnline

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en
1•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
1•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

Don't go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2025/12/19/dont-go-to-physics-grad-school-and-other-cautionary...
1•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/randomly-quoting-ray-bradbury-did-not-save-lawyer-fro...
1•pseudolus•7m ago•0 comments

AI anxiety batters software execs, costing them combined $62B: report

https://nypost.com/2026/02/04/business/ai-anxiety-batters-software-execs-costing-them-62b-report/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•7m ago•0 comments

Bogus Pipeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline
1•doener•9m ago•0 comments

Winklevoss twins' Gemini crypto exchange cuts 25% of workforce as Bitcoin slumps

https://nypost.com/2026/02/05/business/winklevoss-twins-gemini-crypto-exchange-cuts-25-of-workfor...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•9m ago•0 comments

How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
2•obscurette•9m ago•0 comments

Cycling in France

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/france-sheldon.html
1•jackhalford•11m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?

1•abhay1633•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI

https://github.com/JJLDonley/Simple
1•tangjiehao•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor

https://caratria.com/
1•jonrosner•14m ago•1 comments

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

https://mtlynch.io/bootstrapped-founder-year-8/
1•mtlynch•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space

https://tesseract-thread.vercel.app/
1•agliolioyyami•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vibe Colors – Instantly visualize color palettes on UI layouts

https://vibecolors.life/
1•tusharnaik•16m ago•0 comments

OpenAI is Broke ... and so is everyone else [video][10M]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3N9qlPZBc0
2•Bender•17m ago•0 comments

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/rust_cpp/
1•lukastyrychtr•18m ago•0 comments

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5704785
6•derriz•18m ago•1 comments

AI Skills Marketplace

https://skly.ai
1•briannezhad•18m ago•1 comments

Show HN: A fast TUI for managing Azure Key Vault secrets written in Rust

https://github.com/jkoessle/akv-tui-rs
1•jkoessle•18m ago•0 comments

eInk UI Components in CSS

https://eink-components.dev/
1•edent•19m ago•0 comments

Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

2•MicroWagie•22m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT is changing how we ask stupid questions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/06/stupid-questions-ai/
1•edward•23m ago•1 comments

Zig Package Manager Enhancements

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-02-06
3•jackhalford•24m ago•1 comments

Neutron Scans Reveal Hidden Water in Martian Meteorite

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/neutron-scans-reveal-hidden-water-in-famous-martian-meteorite
1•geox•25m ago•0 comments

Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/deepfaking-orson-welless-mangled-masterpiece
1•fortran77•27m ago•1 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
3•nar001•29m ago•2 comments

SpaceX Delays Mars Plans to Focus on Moon

https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/spacex-delays-mars-plans-to-focus-on-moon-66d5c542
1•BostonFern•29m ago•0 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.