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Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
230•theblazehen•2d ago•66 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
694•klaussilveira•15h ago•206 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
962•xnx•20h ago•553 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
5•AlexeyBrin•58m ago•0 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
130•matheusalmeida•2d ago•35 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
66•videotopia•4d ago•6 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
53•jesperordrup•5h ago•24 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
36•kaonwarb•3d ago•27 comments

ga68, the GNU Algol 68 Compiler – FOSDEM 2026 [video]

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
10•matt_d•3d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
236•isitcontent•15h ago•26 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
233•dmpetrov•16h ago•124 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
32•speckx•3d ago•21 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
335•vecti•17h ago•147 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
502•todsacerdoti•23h ago•244 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
385•ostacke•21h ago•97 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
300•eljojo•18h ago•186 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
361•aktau•22h ago•185 comments

UK infants ill after drinking contaminated baby formula of Nestle and Danone

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c931rxnwn3lo
8•__natty__•3h ago•0 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
422•lstoll•21h ago•282 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
68•kmm•5d ago•10 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
96•quibono•4d ago•22 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
21•bikenaga•3d ago•11 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
19•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•5 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
264•i5heu•18h ago•215 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
33•romes•4d ago•3 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
63•gfortaine•13h ago•28 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1076•cdrnsf•1d ago•460 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
39•gmays•10h ago•13 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
298•surprisetalk•3d ago•44 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
154•vmatsiiako•20h ago•72 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.