Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

Post by caminante » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:22 PM UTC

Bender wrote: post #136

caminante wrote: post #100

Per HN policy, stop editorializing the headlines. Here's the actual headline: > Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story

echo -en 'Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story' | wc -c 107 HN also forces editorializing to less than 81 characters. I too sometimes struggle to editorialize the title to something that fits and ideally does not lose context.

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #89

Waterluvian wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or…

The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.

Post by Ekaros » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #158

twodave wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting aside this is sort of a knee-jerk reaction, if this was actually implemented you’d just see the role of the CEO change to basically be a highly-paid fall-guy. People in those positions today would vacate them for quieter roles behind the scenes, and corporations would put greater effort forth to hide their decision making processes. I don’t think it would be a better system.

Why would anyone sign up to be the fall guy? Perhaps because the payoff is worth the the punishment. So make the punishment algorithmically outweigh the payoff, for example by seizing everything they were paid to be the fall guy plus jail time. Doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve if politicians were actually interested in holding CEOs and corporations accountable, the problem is the politicians themselves are b…

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

cannonpr wrote: post #66

fzil wrote: post #3

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier…

Post by dabinat » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

qsera wrote: post #110

mpalmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you apparently like a system that lets people bet on atrocities and then take steps to make said atrocities more likely?

So you are saying that if business entity starts a pharma company that creates a drug for some kind of novel disease, but the disease does not currently exist, they will take steps to make an epidemic of it more likely?