sam0x17

Mark Twain

I wonder what kind of result you'd get with floats

What I like is it's still hard, but you can do things like "prove this using game theory" or "find the optimal value for this and a proof" without having to know game theory or deep math really

There used to be a lot of research into using deep NNs to train decision trees, which are themselves much less of a black box and can actually be reasoned about. I wonder where that all went?

Sounds like a vibe-coded feature if I ever heard of one

It's really gone to shit in the last 2 years

Very ironic for the billionaire to be openly replacing himself with AI, I suppose he believes his job is easy enough that an LLM can do it, so we definitely don't need him

If you have no vulnerabilities in your code you have nothing to worry about

What I mean by "nothing special" is 1 year from now you will say it is an extremely limited model compared to whatever is out then

It's effectively 2026's version of "Doctors hate this one weird trick!"

It's all just really genius marketing. In 6 months Mythos will be nothing special, but right now everyone is being manipulated into fearing its release, as a marketing ploy.

This is the same reason AI founders perennially worry in public that they have created AGI...

Yeah perfect example, the main thing I _would_ use multiple agents on is optimizing/benchmarking code, but for that you specifically can't use worktree, you need one agent per machine or they'll taint each other's benchmarks

The throwing dildos at WNBA games thing https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/wnba/2025/08/07/wnba-s...

It's inherently free data. You have to be able to trade against it, and to trade against it you need to see it _before_ you give them money, so they can basically never charge for it. When they sell it to people, it's just laziness, they could scrape it themselves.

edit: apparently they do, that's even more wild lol

It's not some kind of magical money multiplication machine

Right, it's not even consistent, the manipulation can go either way, at random, but what is sure is the higher the liquidity, the higher the motivation becomes to tamper

Especially when the "prediction" part isn't even part of the product, it is an accidental byproduct. No one pays for access to the predictions.

And they aren't predictions, they are more like "outcome-shaping" markets, since the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome, and at a certain point it will just always happen if it is billions of dollars.

The higher the liquidity involved, the less likely the real world outcome ends up being the same as it would have been if the prediction market had never existed. Very messy.

If anything, the stricter the compiler the better for vibe coding the language

Polymarket being an incompetent cabal that doesn't deserve to have a license is so passe, so ingrained in the standard recurring narrative that comes up whenever prediction markets are mentioned, and so universally agreed upon at this point that it frankly isn't that interesting to a lot of people. We all agree with it already, there is no one left to convince, certainly not on this site, better to talk about more interesting things that are nevertheless related. It's, well, boring, and this is exactly why a comment like this wasn't the top comment. I'm not saying a comment like this wouldn't be true, it would, it just isn't going to be a top comment, and that fact is unsurprising. I do share your sentiment though, that it would have been nice if human attention worked slightly differently here, but it does not.

Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police

Woah there, didn't see this coming to be honest. But, I mean we already trust Israel to spend our tax dollars on genocide, so heck, why not, they'll do a great job!

If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs

First of all, why is it time to get tough on limiting human rights, why is your freedom of speech and freedom of privacy the first thing on the chopping block, rather than Polymarket's license to operate, which is a much more obvious target for all of our disdain.

And also, it's physically impossible to crack down on VPNs 100%, especially within the constitutional framework we have in the US, and the technical reality of the modern internet. Keep in mind the US Government itself invented TOR to help destabilize and leak information out of autocratic regimes that have implemented sweeping censorship and blocking of VPNs (you know, the sort of autocratic regime you apparently want to start here in the US given your comments on the matter).

From a technical perspective, with SSL being standard for most web traffic it is utterly trivial to set up VPNs that hide in all kinds of ways that look completely innocuous and are unblockable. You can even hide exfiltration traffic in DNS queries, and I even got to see this a few times in practice when I still worked for the DoD back in the day. People will go to all kinds of lengths to get information in and out of a closed system and stopping that is like trying to catch air with your hands, you will always just end up hurting/restricting the average citizen and the bad actor who wants to slip through will still slip through.

Such a ban or KYC program is also fundamentally against every notion of privacy and freedom enshrined by the constitution and even more so by the founding spirit and values of the internet and reputable tech circles that care about privacy and freedom. You sound just as bad as Zuckerberg and Palantir trying to push KYC on Linux right now to help build a better mass-surveillance state for their fascist overlords. You seem to be the sort who would be extremely supportive of that project, though I sincerely hope that is not the case.

we have extradition with Israel

For now. Once the Boomers finish their reverse mortgages and are finally out of the equation we'll hopefully cut all funding, sanction Israel, and label them a terroristic genocidal state, which they are. As usual, moral progress is always delayed by rich old men refusing to let go. Ethnostates are also extremely problematic in their own right, never mind genocidal ones. Certainly not morally praiseworthy, certainly not good "ally" material. Should be sanctioned in the very very least, definitely not subsidized.

And the funniest part is I agree with you that Polymarket is bad, which is your underlying point that you care so strongly about throughout this thread, but your arrogance and sudden undeserved spitefulness, in response to completely innocuous, imaginative, on-topic comments, just comes off as really bitter and makes you hard to talk to and even harder to agree with. Like you really have an axe to grind and I think it is rooted in some sort of deep-seated fear that everyone around you is as evil and misanthropic as you claim to be through your espoused values.

because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment.

Remotely relevant? It's not like I'm talking about cats, I'm talking about prediction markets, which is the topic of the article. You would have to be extremely uncharitable to not see a holistic discussion about other problems prediction markets face and possible solutions to those problems as relevant. These topics very seldom come up on HN so a mere mention of prediction markets can and should be a very good excuse to have many side threads on the topic that have been waiting to happen.

It's also fundamentally something you can't really do properly in crypto. You need a central authority to decide if "thing has happened". There's no way to properly incentivize accuracy in cases where the majority of stake benefits from an inaccuracy.

I mean the real purpose is to make money on intelligence-based bets. And what's great is after the fact when everything decrypts you would still get to see the exact timeline of sentiment as it changes, completely undisturbed by the market's existence. This is extremely good data for designing systems to make the correct prediction next time based on things happening in the real world, instead of following the herd and looking for tea leaves in the odds graph. It's the only way to get pure, dollar-weighted sentiment data without the market skewing itself.

You're still making a prediction, it's just much less likely to affect the outcome

I personally think that entire social value rationale is actually what makes prediction markets dangerous / socially bad

Seeing the total liquidity, fine, seeing the odds in real time, really really bad, will shape real-world outcomes vs if the market didn't exist once liquidity is high enough

The problem in the article is sort of boring, this is nothing new, centralized authorities who run prediction markets have been doing a terrible job at wording the predictions and then people get pissed when those poorly written words are put through a forcing function. Incompetence is boring.

You didn't even read my message. At no point do I say the oracle target should be private, that would be ridiculous. Public oracle, private markets on both sides of the issue, until the issue is considered closed, at which point we get to decrypt and find out who betted yes and who betted no. Liquidity would still be public, so you know how much money, but you get no intelligence signal, so world events don't get shaped by the market.

I'm not parent commenter, but any example of an event that actually matters? Elections, wars, the economy, healthcare systems, laws, court cases?

I think the point is more that if it's already happening at this level of adoption, and these are only the ones we know about, surely there are many more where this is happening and we don't know, and as adoption increases, it will get worse and worse since the liquidity on the line will be much higher.

many many, like that stuff with the "will someone throw something at X basketball game" and then someone kept doing it, etc

I'm not even talking about the specific situation. The problem with prediction markets that has been talked about for months is the predictions themselves are being used as an indicator that "thing will happen" and eventually there is so much liquidity on certain markets that the market determines the outcome not the other way around

I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public really shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called "outcome-shaping markets" because largely that is what they do, they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity. If instead these were privacy protocols where you can see how much liquidity is on a specific market, but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes (i.e. using threshold encryption, commit reveal, etc), you'd have a very different situation where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"

Have fun when using this service is itself used in court as evidence for creating a malicious copy

For example, in substrate-based blockchains if you panic in runtime code, the chain is effectively bricked, so they use hundreds of clippy lints to try to prevent this from happening, but you can only do so much statically without language level support. There are crates like no_panic however they basically can't be used anywhere there is dynamic memory allocation because that can panic.

Same thing happens in real time trading systems, distributed systems, databases, etc., you have to design some super critical hot path that can never fail, and you want a static guarantee that that is the fact.