Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 270 posts

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#181

Post by alwa »

clifdweller wrote: post #104
echelon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until they start killing people to win bets. It's going to happen. It'll happy by proxy too. When they figure 90% of Tesla's or SpaceX's valuation is tied to Elon, suddenly he becomes your mark.

That has proven not to be the case with sports betting. Otherwise every major league pitcher would be needing armed guards to stop all the people with pipes trying to disable them. Seems there is at least some morality to not harm people but no issue in harming temperature sensors so where is the split line? Some really annoying ones like trains being on time can impact thousands yet i could see someone stepping out…

In fact sports bodies are complaining of exactly that being the case, and in much more obscure leagues than Major League Baseball (whose pitchers are presumably accustomed to, and compensated for, the hazards of celebrity):

'Decapitated bodies, death threats, that's our daily life': Tennis players, helpless targets of angry gamblers [ https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/08/decapita... ]

https://www.wtatennis.com/news/4288181/wta-and-itf-release-a...

When the vice industry kept gamblers mainly confined to their own community, it was ugly enough (see the “people with pipes” debt collection trope you refer to). I don’t care too much about how people get their jollies. But I don’t see much good in letting vice behaviors and motivations slop out onto the wider world uninvited.

To your question, then: I’d draw the moral line at “don’t base forecasting gambles on any indicator produced by someone who didn’t agree to be used that way.” If I—as the entity or constituency who incurs the cost to produce an indicator—want to hire the prediction market to run bets on it at arms’ length from me, fine. If not, no.

The burden should be on the gambling interests to prove they’re contributing value to a specific domain, not on everyone else in every domain to prove gambling’s specific negative externalities.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#182

Post by sixothree »

lostlogin wrote: post #44
echelon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until they start killing people to win bets. It's going to happen. It'll happy by proxy too. When they figure 90% of Tesla's or SpaceX's valuation is tied to Elon, suddenly he becomes your mark.

Not sure that he has done wonders for Tesla sales over the last few years, and he collected enemies quicker than most.

It's fine. People quickly forget the "bad stuff".

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#183

Post by AndroTux »

gowld wrote: post #24
WarmWash wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casinos are purpose built to make you lose. People still show up compulsively everyday.

Casinos have many games with exact payout odds posted. Polymarket does not.

So? There’s no game with payout odds in your favor.

Lotto (at least where I live) also shows the odds, which are always ridiculously low. Still, people play, because the human brain isn’t built to understand odds. It’s essentially worthless as a metric.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#185

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jsw97 wrote: post #79
echelon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until they start killing people to win bets. It's going to happen. It'll happy by proxy too. When they figure 90% of Tesla's or SpaceX's valuation is tied to Elon, suddenly he becomes your mark.

This hypothetical situation had existed since the dawn of capital markets, or at least since the dawn of short selling. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone get assassinated to make a short bet pay off though.

And there is an obvious reason for this. Murder is very illegal. You therefore don't need short selling to be illegal because if someone sells short without killing anyone then that's fine, and if they do assassinate someone then you don't need to be able to charge them with short selling because you can charge them with murder.

Notice also that the murder (or tampering with sensors etc.) is the thing you don't want happening in your jurisdiction, so that's the thing you have to prohibit anyway, because even if you ban short selling or prediction markets in your jurisdiction, having them in any other jurisdiction in the world would allow anyone to just place their bet there and you're right back to needing to deter that by punishing the murder rather than the bet.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#186

Post by drtz »

dessimus wrote: post #134
Analemma_ wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you put two locks on your door? Clearly you deserved to get burgled if you only used one. Building Byzantine fault tolerance into absolutely everything is expensive, and makes everything we do and buy more expensive. It would be better and cheaper to rely on social trust, if that's possible-- and it was possible before these gambling sites. Prediction markets are burning social trust as fuel to make profit…

>Why didn't you put two locks on your door? Clearly you deserved to get burgled if you only used one. I can reasonably test that the bolt is in a locked position every time I close the door and turn handle on the lock. But a single remote sensor could have malfunctioned or simply be out of calibration a few degrees. If the actual temperature at the airport is important to any set of users enough so that the differenc…

> If the actual temperature at the airport is important to any set of users enough so that the difference between it being 18 or 22 deg C is relevant, one should expect that there be at least 3 sensors

Three sensors doesn't solve the problem. Manipulating becomes marginally more difficult with three sensors, but it's still very possible, and with enough monetary incentive it's still even likely that it happens again.

So why not 5 sensors? How about 10?

And what about more consequential issues like the toppling of governments or military blockades where true redundancy is impossible and people are actually harmed?

Is there not a point where you start to blame the incentives that are being chased?

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#187

Post by ipython »

ianferrel wrote: post #74
ipython wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sense, that's already happened. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/kalshi-sued-over-o... and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-... > Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple, just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces.

It hasn't happened in this case. Your example has causality reversed. Khamenei wasn't killed because there was a prediction market about the political leadership of Iran.

It is interesting, though, that a large bet was placed not long before the assassination attempt that paid out $550k. By definition, killing the leader does imply that they are no longer the political leader of the country.

It is entirely possible that there was causality in the forward direction if the bettor had inside information about the assassination operation beforehand.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#188

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

palmotea wrote: post #118
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable Mostly no. If you're connected it to a banking account, or other KYC platform, maybe, but the folks capable of doing that are part of the same administration supposedly doing the manipulation, so they would not investigate themselves. Indeed, they are actually fighting against those trying to regulate it [0] Indeed , the president's son works for Polymarket ,…

>> Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable > Mostly no. If you're connected it to a banking account, or other KYC platform, maybe, But if you're (say) and American betting on it, the money almost certainly flows through one of those entities. And if you're using bitcoin the ledger is totally public, so you could track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept p…

How can I, an ordinary person, track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept payment (or vice versa)." in order to link a real identity to a prediction market identity?

I don't have access to that. The government which has access to that is the very government making money doing this, so would not investigate itself.

If your question was purely technical, the answer is maybe, depending on the exchange flow. e.g. Maybe it was exchanged through Monero along the way or something, then the answer might be closer to "no".

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#189

Post by tsunagatta »

LanceH wrote: post #175
johnhamlin wrote: post #127

Remember when it was just common sense that letting people gamble on things would undermine the integrity of those things?

The critics of prediction markets needs to decide if they are against the markets because they are gambling, or because they aren't gambling.

No, they don't. It's fine to be against them in both ways, considering that the platforms themselves can't decide if they're gambling or not.

Re: 'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet

#190

Post by danny_codes »

e28eta wrote: post #116
thimabi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why these bets are allowed at all. Can one just make an account there and bet in anything? The whole “prediction market” charade is increasingly proving to lend itself to abuse. I hope regulations catch up with it soon, otherwise more shenanigans will follow.

John Oliver just did a segment on prediction markets. https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4 Turns out the US federal regulator is not doing their job, and is actively trying to prevent US states from imposing regulations.

The Trump admin, abdicating their duties? How unexpected /s
Post reply on HN