What's interesting to me is how much this has been criticized and yet it is still in place. This is pretty much the first point that comes up on HN every time the topic is Quora, so there is simply no way they are unaware of the complaints.
I worked at Quora, and I wish Adam would speak about this publicly. His reasons for this are very solid and he articulates them in a very convincing way. Maybe now that Quora has joined YC, he may speak more about it publicly since it's such a point of contention for many YC News readers.
It's a discussion of "good places to find large datasets open to the public". There are 132 or so answers, so I wouldn't even try to copy them all here (copyright issues aside anyway), but here's the current contents of the answer wiki. Note that some of these got partially truncated by the c&p from Quora, so if you want the full URL, you'll have to login or get somebody else to fix it. I'm too lazy for all that right now. :-)
Here are many of the links mentioned so far:
Cross-disciplinary data repositories, data collections and data search engines:
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/CPES/ - Collaborative
Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys: (A collection of three national surveys focused on each of the major ethnic groups to study psychiatric illnesses and health services use)
I don't blame you, but it worked for me without signing into anything and I deleted my Facebook account several years ago. I do have an actual Quora account, which of course it would be a nuisance to have to sign into every time as well, but for whatever reason, it seems to either keep me signed in or sign me in automatically; maybe try to see if you can get it to do this? I'm using Chrome if that matters.
