akrolsmir

Oh awesome! I love Stripe Atlas overall for the fast/excellent UX, but Clerky supports PBCs and a higher degree of customization (eg useful for incorporating for https://manifest.is since we had previously agreed on an informal equity split with a bunch of people).

Hoping that now they'll have the best of both worlds!

Agreed re: automatically running Pangram, maybe once the articles hit some vote threshold (or just, frontpage) in case cost is a concern.

I think aggregators running AI checks automatically seems quite good, rather than individual readers all doing it on their own sporadically. We recently implemented auto Pangram checks on Manifund, and I think LessWrong has done this for a while now.

Hey! Surplus is a new incubator I'm organizing, partly as a love letter to early YC. A specific, early YC that I’ve only experienced vicariously: first through PG’s essays, more recently The Social Radars podcast.

(When I hear about Paul cooking chili for early batches, or Jessica delivering air conditioners by hand, I think, “yes, this, this is what I want”.)

Today, YC is like Harvard: an institution whose approval confers prestige, who curates a network of formidable alumni. That’s valuable, but I long for something else; something bespoke, thoughtful, loving. And since I want this thing myself, I’m betting that other founders do, too — and so I’m taking a stab at making it.

Having started projects like Manifold, Manifund, Mox and Manifest, I hope I’m in a good position to help others with their fledgling projects!

Apply on surplus.dev, or ask me any questions you might have~

Hey! I'm Austin; I'm building better funding mechanisms at Manifund. One kind of grant I'm intrigued by are retroactive grants -- payment for good work, already accomplished.

VaccinateCA stood out to me as one examplar effort that could have used more funding, and as such a good target for such a retroactive grant. Would love to hear your thoughts!

Austin from Manifold here - cool to see this trending! I thought the structure of this prediction market was especially cool, as it forms a collaborative, crowdsourced puzzle challenge to generate the perfect prompt.

(I've personally bet yes, but not sure if that prediction is holding up...)

Yeah! I think of Metaculus vs Manifold a bit like NYT vs Twitter -- or to borrow another analogy, lawful good vs chaotic evil. But we're both great places to think about the future in a bit more structured way than pure punditry!

I don't have any special insight into what happened at Oragenics (my full context on this application includes what's listed at the link, plus a short call with Aaron about his fundraising plans). There's a little more color on the Wikipedia page for the cavity vaccine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine

A few HN commenters seem to think that there's a nefarious explanation where a cavity wonder treatment would be unprofitable to develop; I think that's possible, but also it could just be that the company dropped the ball. Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Yeah, agreed that the proposal has a whiff of "too good to be true". The applicant's track record looks fairly good, though (he's previously invested in my startup, Manifold Markets, and otherwise has an interesting history in many different domains).

I think if there's even a 1% chance that the intervention looks as good as promised, it'd be worth further study for the proposed costs.

Oh wow -- totally didn't expect one of our grant proposals to be trending on HN! I'm Austin, cofounder at Manifund; we just launched our regranting program last week (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RMXctNAksBgXgoszY/...) and are currently looking out for cool grants (like this one!) to fund.

Happy to answer any questions!

Austin from Manifold here -- the actions and fallout from the Whales vs Minnows market definitely led to some soul-searching on our team and among our community. I'm grateful that we're seeing our users get so hyped up about a relatively silly game! At the same time, we're trying to refocus our prediction markets on noteworthy, valuable topics for the world (eg at https://manifold.markets/group/showcase)

For fun: One of our users generated a dramatized trailer video with AI at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3bgODqIBc

Hey! Austin from Manifold here, thanks for the links! I wanted to note that our novel mechanism which we've termed "Maniswap" is indeed pretty cool, but for most intents and purposes a simpler Uniswap constant product market maker would already do quite well as a mechanism, with the advantage that it's really simple (explainable on the back of a napkin!)

Happy to chat more about prediction markets/AMMs, feel free to reach out to austin@manifold.markets

Hey! Curious to get your thoughts on this. My girlfriend is interested in trying out more web programming; she's taken a couple of classes in C++ but no html/css/js yet. It's been a long time since I've looked at the state of online tutorials for learning to code, and I'm curious what the best resources are nowadays - since picking any one feels like a decent-sized commitment of a few dozen hours, I'd like to hear what people have to say.

Hey! I like the idea of this a lot; oftentimes in team standups, I feel our discussions would benefit from a clear issue owner, as well as the space for others to give feedback.

I might suggest trying other more granular voting systems instead of just up/down voting: 5-star voting, set number of points, or my personal favorite: prediction markets! A prediction market makes participants calibrate how much they believe in a particular choice, and also makes a clear ledger so everyone can get a sense of how often they have been correct in the past.

Here's one example of a market we set up for informing an important decision (which database our site would use): https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-database-will-manifold-...

We do have an API to make this pretty simple! Check out https://docs.manifold.markets/api

And a not-so-secret endpoint where you can use URL params to prepopulate the question field, eg https://manifold.markets/create?q=Rust%20will%20also%20begin...

Manifold Markets | Software & UX Eng | REMOTE | Full Time | https://mni.fo/jobs

Manifold Markets is a platform for user-created prediction markets. Our goal is to create the largest, most accessible, and most impactful forecasting platform by allowing users to create and participate in their own prediction markets.

We're super impact-focused. As of today, we're open source, and support donations to charities! Check it out: https://manifoldmarkets.substack.com/p/manifold-for-good-man...

Hi HN! We were inspired by Radical Markets to set up a Harberger Tax on all our leaderboard spots. This means that instead of trying to make good predictions in our markets in the hopes of turning a profit, users can just buy a leaderboard position directly.

Harberger Taxes are cool because they present a possible solution for how to efficiently assess, for example, land values in the real world. I'm super excited to be prototyping out this new mechanism, and to see how Harberger Taxes function in the real world! We have more details on the implementation on our Substack: https://manifoldmarkets.substack.com/p/below-the-fold-manafo...

Hi! Austin from Manifold here. I'm glad you've found Manifold to be really cool, and want to share it with the world! At the same time, I'm a bit worried this falls afoul of the official guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

"Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion."

We want to make sure our HN submissions are interesting by themselves, and not primarily self-promotional. Thanks again for your enthusiasm!

Yeah - we do store foreign keys, but Firestore only supports fetching a batch of 10 keys at a time afaict. It might just be the wrong tool, like you said.

We do very much want real-time updating, but there are okay integrations for that with RBDMS's now (eg Supabase). Primarily, I'm curious about some of the newer/more modern DBs, and whether anyone has had good or bad experiences with them!

We've started on Firebase Cloud Functions, but lately I've been interested in moving our serverless stack to Vercel's functions instead - the developer experience is much better (no idea about cold-starts though). We'd lose the neat integration with Firebase Auth, though...

Yeah - Supabase would be my leading bet, if we had to pick a Postgres variant. Would be especially excited for their GraphQL plugin becomes ready: https://supabase.com/blog/2021/12/03/pg-graphql

Yeah - totally agreed re: eng time > server costs; the db costs are the least significant part of the equation.

Fundamentally, I'm trying to optimize for something like "developer happiness as we build out lots of new features quickly". My dream workflow would look something like: take the Typescript types we've defined on the client, and shove that somewhere in the cloud; then later query to pull out exactly the data we need to render any particular view of our site (ala GraphQL)

AND I'd really like to not have to spend a lot of up-front time knowing exactly which indices to set up, or to figure out complicated migrations later. And I'd like to not think about hosting/managing replications, etc. Maybe that's too many asks, and I'm being too greedy! I'm just hoping that someone's solved this pain point already, and I just haven't heard about it.

More context: The main thing I'm unhappy with is the extra developer burden imposed by needing to denormalize information. E.g: I have a user document in Firestore, with userId, name, and avatarUrl. If I want to be able to fetch a list of comments and have the name & avatarUrl of the creators, in Firestore I have to write those alongside userId. Then, if I later add isVerified to the user document, I need to either backfill my entire db and denormalize again; or client-side handle the missing case.

Then the other pain point is the "joins" use case; right now we do the equivalent of fetching all comments & users, then doing an in-memory join. Ideally, we could craft a single request that just says "get the 10 latest comments on this market, plus the associated avatars" without data duplication and without doing a bunch of up-front thinking about exactly how to structure indexes.

My hesitation with relational DBs comes from the mismatch between client data model (loosely, JSON objects of pointers) and how it's represented in the DB (in a row); plus the requirements of needing to specify your e.g. indices up front, and annoyance of doing migrations. I'm hopeful someone's found a graph-type solution to work really well for them!

Yup, right now "free-to-play game currency" is a good way to think about Manifold dollars. We'd love to support a real-money equivalent at some point though; stay tuned for updates on this front (https://manifoldmarkets.substack.com/)

I definitely understand this frame of mind. On the face of it, it seems quite absurd that anyone can do anything, e.g. insider trade, or use sock puppet accounts to manipulate information. In practice, we've seen it work okay so far!

One key realization is that individual market creators on Manifold are given the same powers that existing prediction market platform or casino bookies are trusted with today. A trader is always placing some amount of trust in the bookie to not manipulate the own market, or pricing that risk into the transaction. We hope to make this risk clear and up-front, and to reward market creators who repeatedly adjudicate markets in a fair way.

They have a lot in common! Kalshi and Manifold Markets both offer prediction markets: places where you can come bet on future outcomes.

Kalshi accepts real USD, and all questions are listed and resolved by the Kalshi team; Manifold works with play money (for now), and allows anyone to list and resolve markets.

Yup, this is the idea behind blockchain oracles. At the end of the day, you're still making a judgement call behind who you want to trust to represent "truth" e.g. when deciding that Google sports is more trustworthy than ESPN. We think this approach makes sense for certain kinds of markets, especially those that occur more regularly and are well-formed.

Yup, you can join our Substack to hear about updates (https://manifoldmarkets.substack.com/), or come chat with us on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/eHQBNBqXuh)

PredictionBook was definitely one of our inspirations! They are somewhat out of date with respect to UX; and we've also spent some time innovating on a new Automated Market Maker so that our markets work well for differing levels of trader volume. We hope to bring PredictionBook's core ideas to a much wider audience~

Yeah, oracles are a common solution to the question of "how should the prediction market get resolved". We think there are some usability problems with oracles in practice, which is why most prediction markets (e.g. PredictIt, Kalshi) still end up relying on platform resolution.

That said, we'd be very happy if anyone was interested in setting up an oracle on our Manifold! "User-resolved" includes the possibility of "user publicly commits to resolving all markets via an automated, predefined oracle".

Would love to hear about your interest in self-hosting! We've consider supporting that use case for e.g. software teams who want to set up markets on sensitive data like revenue forecasts or user growth numbers. If you'd like to chat more privately, reach out anytime to me at akrolsmir@gmail.com!

That's good to hear! Harsimony floated the idea in this post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/d43f6HCWawNSazZqb/... , and I think it's quite an interesting idea, especially because regulators may look more favorably upon this kind of system if the proceeds go to charity; think of donor lotteries and charity poker nights.