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Comment by killingtime74 | Hacker News Reader

I was just checking which were the top guesses on polymarket before the announcement and this winner was not even a choice on there. At least we know there's no insider trading at the Nobel foundation.

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> In accordance with Nobel's will, the prize is selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a five-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway unlike all the other awards chosen by the Swedish Nobel Committee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize

There's been accusations of leaks in connection to bets with the Nobel Price in Literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Literature_cont...

Machado’s odds suddenly surged to almost 80% 12 hours before the announcement

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1o383a1/oc...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/10/nobel-peace-pr...

Wasn’t that because their CMS had URLs that were easy to guess?

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1o51k61/upd...

It makes me wonder- how many people are making a living guessing 'secrets' like this on polymarket? Not with bribes and leaks, but just poor infosec. Seems like interesting work, and probably lucrative with the right skillset.

Good point. You could hack someone and just lurk and never do anything directly malicious that would make them notice your presence

There was an interesting interview on the OddLots podcast recently with people who are doing this. They were remarkably sophisticated.

Do you remember the podcast number or title? Curious to hear more about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFAnQpdgkZE

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/these-are-the-sharps-a...

gambling - this is news?

Perception and financial market movement is interesting to a curious and educated mind.

You know where to head for the cat memes.

I've just checked what's happening on Polymarket right now and there's a question [0] involving new Meta model naming. Polymarket themselves are providing an API, so one could theoretically proactively scan/crawl common places where such a name might inadvertently be included (Hugging Face, GitHub, docs, etc) before a public announcement. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is already doing that.

[0] https://polymarket.com/event/what-will-the-next-muse-model-f...

The prize in economics is even more different, "in memory of alfred nobel"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...

Yes, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the actual Nobels but the name.

I wonder...

If I had inside information, and didn't want to make it obvious, I'd just take the opposite side of any bet for candidates I knew wouldn't win.

Sorry, but your reasoning is incomplete. They could have bet millions on the negative result for each of the candidates that were listed. You aren't forced to bet on a winner, you can instead bet on everybody to lose.

this seems a bit odd to me (change the link to 1 day)

https://polymarket.com/event/nobel-peace-prize-winner-2026-1...

Yulia Navalnaya (widow of Alexei Navalny) had a ton of play, and Navi Pillay didn't even have a market?

edit: and what dang just added about the US - ICC sanctions

Pretty stupid prize to bet on considering the committee keeps even the nominees secret for 50 years.

I hope it gets banned by the next administration.

It would be funny to have such a prize finance itself by doing this. Openly. Game theory working over time on that one.

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