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Ask HN: AI Generated Diagrams

1•voidhorse•1m ago•0 comments

Microsoft Account bugs locked me out of Notepad – are Thin Clients ruining PCs?

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-locked-me-out-of-notepad-is-the-thin-...
1•josephcsible•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A delightful Mac app to vibe code beautiful iOS apps

https://milq.ai/hacker-news
1•jdjuwadi•4m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Gemini Station – A local Chrome extension to organize AI chats

https://github.com/rajeshkumarblr/gemini_station
1•rajeshkumar_dev•4m ago•0 comments

Welfare states build financial markets through social policy design

https://theloop.ecpr.eu/its-not-finance-its-your-pensions/
2•kome•8m ago•0 comments

Market orientation and national homicide rates

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.70023
3•PaulHoule•8m ago•0 comments

California urges people avoid wild mushrooms after 4 deaths, 3 liver transplants

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-death-cap-mushrooms-poisonings-liver-transplants/
1•rolph•9m ago•0 comments

Matthew Shulman, co-creator of Intellisense, died 2019 March 22

https://www.capenews.net/falmouth/obituaries/matthew-a-shulman/article_33af6330-4f52-5f69-a9ff-58...
3•canucker2016•10m ago•1 comments

Show HN: SuperLocalMemory – AI memory that stays on your machine, forever free

https://github.com/varun369/SuperLocalMemoryV2
1•varunpratap369•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pyrig – One command to set up a production-ready Python project

https://github.com/Winipedia/pyrig
1•Winipedia•13m ago•0 comments

Fast Response or Silence: Conversation Persistence in an AI-Agent Social Network [pdf]

https://github.com/AysajanE/moltbook-persistence/blob/main/paper/main.pdf
1•EagleEdge•13m ago•0 comments

C and C++ dependencies: don't dream it, be it

https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2026/02/c-and-c-dependencies-dont-dream-it-be-it.html
1•ingve•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vbuckets – Infinite virtual S3 buckets

https://github.com/danthegoodman1/vbuckets
1•dangoodmanUT•14m ago•0 comments

Open Molten Claw: Post-Eval as a Service

https://idiallo.com/blog/open-molten-claw
1•watchful_moose•15m ago•0 comments

New York Budget Bill Mandates File Scans for 3D Printers

https://reclaimthenet.org/new-york-3d-printer-law-mandates-firearm-file-blocking
2•bilsbie•15m ago•1 comments

The End of Software as a Business?

https://www.thatwastheweek.com/p/ai-is-growing-up-its-ceos-arent
1•kteare•17m ago•0 comments

Exploring 1,400 reusable skills for AI coding tools

https://ai-devkit.com/skills/
1•hoangnnguyen•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A unique twist on Tetris and block puzzle

https://playdropstack.com/
1•lastodyssey•21m ago•0 comments

The logs I never read

https://pydantic.dev/articles/the-logs-i-never-read
1•nojito•22m ago•0 comments

How to use AI with expressive writing without generating AI slop

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/bakhtin-collapse-ai-expressive-writing
1•cnunciato•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LinkScope – Real-Time UART Analyzer Using ESP32-S3 and PC GUI

https://github.com/choihimchan/linkscope-bpu-uart-analyzer
1•octablock•23m ago•0 comments

Cppsp v1.4.5–custom pattern-driven, nested, namespace-scoped templates

https://github.com/user19870/cppsp
1•user19870•24m ago•1 comments

The next frontier in weight-loss drugs: one-time gene therapy

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/01/24/fractyl-glp1-gene-therapy/
2•bookofjoe•27m ago•1 comments

At Age 25, Wikipedia Refuses to Evolve

https://spectrum.ieee.org/wikipedia-at-25
2•asdefghyk•30m ago•4 comments

Show HN: ReviewReact – AI review responses inside Google Maps ($19/mo)

https://reviewreact.com
2•sara_builds•30m ago•1 comments

Why AlphaTensor Failed at 3x3 Matrix Multiplication: The Anchor Barrier

https://zenodo.org/records/18514533
1•DarenWatson•32m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How much of your token use is fixing the bugs Claude Code causes?

1•laurex•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Agents – Sync MCP Configs Across Claude, Cursor, Codex Automatically

https://github.com/amtiYo/agents
1•amtiyo•36m ago•0 comments

Hello

2•otrebladih•37m ago•1 comments

FSD helped save my father's life during a heart attack

https://twitter.com/JJackBrandt/status/2019852423980875794
3•blacktulip•40m 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.