441–450 of 741 posts
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And there is a kid’s legal version! They sell them in Walmart - Pokémon packs. I don’t know how any of this is legal in a civilized country.
Kids version has been around my entire life (baseball cards) it even used to come with bubblegum!
I kind of miss it.
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I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market making which is preferable
> I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly mean that poker isn't gambling.
They are fundamentally different. In slots, you bet against the house, in poker you bet against other players. So slots are gambling in the traditional sense. Poker however is no different than buying a house. There is still a house fee in both cases and in both cases you are betting against other people. And in poker, new players can enter and inject capital just like the housing market. You going to ban buying houses next? You can't eliminate risk from life.
You are basically trying out outlaw luck and randomness at this point.
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Actually, prediction markets are closer to stock markets (insofar as you consider stock trading to be gambling). Insider trading is the bigger issue
I've heard people say this but it really only makes sense if you don't think about it for more than 10 or 20 seconds. Prediction markets by definition always resolve to one side being completely wiped out and losing everything. Stocks going to zero happens pretty seldomly, in prediction markets it's guaranteed to happen every single time.
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There are no fees on Polymarket. Not sure about others.
There is a fee implicit in the market spread. It's formed out of the time value of money w.r.t. the cost of NOT trading as well as the adverse selection faced by those with standing offers. Increased insider trading will increase spreads.
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“People who disagree with me are sociopaths” doesn’t have the persuasive power you seem to imagine.
Strawmen aren’t particularly persuasive either. If I said “people who think murder is okay are sociopaths” would you have a problem?
There are people that think killing is okay, you're almost definitely one of them. It's just, there's a very specific set of contexts where killing is considered okay. For example, a police sniper taking out an active shooter at a sports event would probably be nearly universally considered a justified killing. It isn't murder because there are reasons it's ok for the killing to have been done.
Just an interesting thing to think about. Using murder for examples like this is a bit loaded.
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I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city. It’s always been bad, but in my eyes it’s so much worse now that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas or something to bet (and lose) big.
Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies. Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock ma…
Explain this more? Let's assume you're Nate Silver and predict the 50 state outcome perfectly - you have a 50% in the class, so failing? Then the only way to "win" is to wager 50 points on the stock market (doesn't matter which way it goes). Wagering less makes no sense, because you start at 50 and so going "up" 25 to 75% protects nothing as the downside is still way below failing.
It sounds like a game theory question - you should be able to get 40 points on the states easy enough even if you get the toss-up ones wrong, and then gamble the full total on the stock market (which in general should go up, the market loves certainty and hates uncertainty).
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I think the difference between the two is Amazon and Meta do provide some utility to balance it out, whereas gambling is purely a net negative on society. You can be young and naive enough to believe you're "making the world a better place" in big tech. You can't work on pure gambling products without being a scammer at heart; you know what you signed up for.
This comment would make more sense if it were before the new wave of prediction markets, which are high-profile gambling products clearly largely made and popularized by true believers who think they are making the world a better place.
https://youtu.be/gwJQG4tFqZA?si=9IbdAR4O-lGiTVtN
See: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/politics/trump-prediction-mar...
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With enough cash on the line, humans are very resourceful at manipulating outcomes. Humans already control the weather: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding . We already have an example of humans sabotaging the measurement of weather: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684440 . Two ranchers sabotaged weather monitoring stations in order to fraudulently collect millions in drought insurance. One of the farm…
Funny, downthread there is actually a report of someone experiencing manipulation of weather prediction markets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535355
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> unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has It depends on the role. If you were doing something deeply technical, or facing customers who loved your work, I think you get a pass. If you were building features nobody outside your company is thankful for, you need t…
Building part of a killing machine isn't really something you can defend, even if you weren't working on the part of the machine that does the killing.
I think you're likely trying to say "the guy who wrote the positioning code" is as much a killing machine maker as the guy who loaded the explosives.