alt Hacker News> There are no indications so far that the successful punters have had to return their winnings. However, the data source for Paris’s hottest temperature has since moved to a sensor at the smaller Paris-Le Bourget airport.
Here's the negative externality that no one will care about. There's no reason gamblers won't repeat this stunt, until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a fortified compound in order to do so.
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Re externalities, don't they use the temperature to calculate the length of the takeoff roll and other stuff about the flight, fuel load, etc? Maybe they use the plane's own temperature sensors for that though.
>There's no reason gamblers won't repeat this stunt, until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a fortified compound in order to do so.
The issue here is you'd need a lot more land because any asphalt near a temp sensor is going to give you bad data.
Yes we've got to stop this. Meanwhile dictators are laughing at us while our totally free "thus, awesome" society kills itself.
Usually the TOS of these betting markets prohibits tampering. IIRC, someone bet on a streaker at the super bowl, did the streaking themselves, made 6-figures on the bet, bragged about it publicly, and the market negated the bet and recovered the money.
So the "negative" externality is that the data you value has been forced to now be higher quality/reliable? From your perspective, isn't the result a positive?
You could just sue, but usually gambling is already illegal in most jurisdictions unless licensed in the location.
I mean, there are plenty of negative externalities that this type of gambling brings that are much worse, but at least in this case it does appear that authorities are investigating. At the very least I would expect some law to be broken if interfering with official weather data collection at an active airport.
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.
> until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a fortified compound in order to do so.
A fortified compound would affect the temperature reading.
This is an existing problem with physical world sensing. Some data models are already heavily polluted by people manipulating observations for various purposes. Most people who rely on those measurements are just collateral damage. Prediction markets provide yet another incentive. It is far more difficult to reliably get at "ground truth" than I think people imagine.
Unlike computing systems, the physical world is a shared mutable environment. It is effectively impossible to lock people out so that you can get a reliable, clean measurement even when people are not intentionally sabotaging the data model.
There are ways to robustly clean this up analytically but it is largely beyond the capabilities of current tech stacks.