I find it curious that there's a spike on February 14, but not one on November 14. There's somewhat of an increase starting at November 14, but it's not clear if that's a consequence of Valentine's Day. It's as if planning a birth on the holiday motivates reproduction more than the holiday itself.

> If you ask me - many of them deserve it.

The point of justice is to avoid further crimes by rendering the criminal harmless, and by making an example out of them to scare away other potential criminals. What does 'deserving it' have to do with this, and how is it applicable? Do you think prisons exist out of resentment toward people?

I'm curious as to how instrumental automation and illegitimate poll voting have been in producing this result. I'm talking about things like pro-Trump Twitter bots[1], 4chan's /pol/ board mass-voting Trump in online polls, and automated thread voting to keep /r/The_Donald at the top of the trending subreddit list on Reddit. Does anyone have an idea?

1. A third of pro-Trump Twitter activity turned out to be automated. See: http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/18/technology/twitter-bots-dona...

I think you need to check the definition of direct democracy. The U.S. has never had that form of government, so U.S. history cannot possibly demonstrate the accuracy of Madison's arguments.

Another idea: people who are really annoying get double-hellbanned, and there's a checkbox that says "show very dead"!

Are there any important sites (like news / discussion sites) that require this?

> What did Reddit do right that Digg did wrong? Well, they haven’t redesigned since what appears to be 1997, which has pleased their user base who like the simple look.

Reddit was founded in 1997?

> At the root of the problem is the criminal justice system itself. Statistically, once officially accused of a crime in Russia, there is little chance of proving your innocence.

Not to mention that it should be the other way around. People are innocent by default, so it should be innocent until proven guilty.

One self is not enough.

Just a couple of weeks ago we had an article about why smart people don't think of others as stupid (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3984894), and now they're stupid themselves? I'm puzzled.

He isn't being very fair: where the goal at first was to be as right as possible, it later became "to piss off as few of the 300 guests as possible". I'm not sure what exact procedure he had in mind for businesses, but in a situation where "votes eliminate the interesting edges, leaving only the boring residue that no one hated enough to vote off the island" applies, you're just not talking about the wisdom of crowds anymore, this wasn't possible in his earlier examples either. An important factor to the wisdom of crowds, and a key difference between his earlier examples and his later examples, is that people vote independently, without even talking about what they're going to vote.

For demonstrational purposes, I will now take his holiday meal situation and apply actual wisdom of crowds to them. This isn't a very usual situation, but this is about properly applying the wisdom of crowds.

Instead of people stating what they dislike, people may nominate a meal, and afterwards, everyone votes for the meal they want to go with. Like in the Wants to be a Millionaire examples, people cannot talk in this process - they cannot state what they dislike. Instead, the fact that some people can't take spicy food will show in the results, but beside that, every individual will pick a meal that isn't boring, and the end result will be just that. "Allergic to garlic" and "doesn’t eat anything green" are rather specific complaints and were not taken into account, so let's count those 3 people as unsatisfied, but the success here is that most people will in fact be satisfied with the meal.