Everyone knows it, no matter how gifted you are chances of your discovering something important is same as any random guy discovering something equally important, i.e., mostly random.
You limit access to the data, you limit ability of others to make an important discovery. Status quo won't offer free access to this data because it apparently reduces their importance.
Indeed. More and more discoveries these days come from cross-field interactions.
Things like a prof from one field walking past a blackboard with some formula or other for a different field and noticing that it is remarkably similar to something he knows intimately, or a solved problem in his field.
Similarly fresh eyes may notice or question something that trained eyes has overlooked virtually by habit.
That said, there is a risk that one get a "eternal september" scenario where any useful input is drowned in the flood of noise from a stampeding horde of newcomers.
Perhaps those who released the data can still claim some credit. "We analyzed the data using a cluster of intelligent learning agents, which revealed a number of interesting patterns."
I've hired plenty of technically rockstar employees for cash strapped startups.
Those who get kick out of these technical challenges are willing to do it for nearly free - we only gotta make sure, their other needs are taken care of.
I find Discourse absolutely horrendous. Discourse mailing-list mode is a tack-on at best, and the formatting you get in mail notifications basically require you to be online to visit the link. And the gamification is also a huge put-off.
Web forums made us forgot how far we came with NNTP years ago. Even the shittiest NNTP could do subthread splitting, hiding and scoring. Handling hundreds of messages per day was easy. The convenience of doing-it-all under one powerful client was massive.
You can still do that with mailing lists, as long as it's not as badly managed as forums-with-a-wanna-be-mailing-list-mode addon as Discourse is.
Since startup time is important, why don't browsers just stay running but pause all threads? The memory consumption of a browser process without any tabs open is insignificant for the vast majority of users.
Google Chrome does this, I think by default. It starts the browser process when you log in to your computer, so when you open a browser window it is really fast.
it is a tick in the settings. something called "Continue running background apps.." in the settings-->advanced -- useful if you need google hangouts running in the background, or to get notifications from websites. I disable that though on all of my machines.
