from Hacker News

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Makes Its First Acquisition, Meta

by spuiszis on 1/23/17, 8:55 PM with 33 comments

• by skosuri on 1/24/17, 5:17 AM

  Hmm, I hope they got a good price. This doesn't really seem like a pain point for researchers (at least not for me). We are all pretty adept at using existing tools to find the papers we need to find. The bigger issue is time to properly read them.

  That said, I like the idea of CZI acting as a hub for tool development that will enable all researchers broadly. There are a bunch of tools that are incredibly useful to making logistics of a lab simpler.

  1. Lab management and logistics: quartzy and others

  2. Online paper writing: overleaf and a few others

  3. DNA Bashing: benchling et al

  4. Bioinformatics: They could do a bunch here

  I worry that a lot of things in this space right now will disappear pretty quickly once the VC gravy train runs dry. More importantly, I think this is something that CZI might have expertise to do well and sustainably.

• by dhairya on 1/24/17, 12:24 AM

  Also check out Semantic Scholar. It's a publicly available tool from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Currently supports CS research and neuroscience research, but we're working on expanding the domains in the upcoming years. One of the cool features is citation influence. You can see which citations are actually influential in an article.

  https://www.semanticscholar.org/

• by tabeth on 1/23/17, 10:36 PM

  I've never heard of Meta, so, like any normal human being I went on their website. [1]

  TLDR: From a glance, this entire organization's existence is centered around the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There's no indication of anything useful they've done for real. I'm sure I could find that information if I bothered to look more, but for an organization that describes themselves as "mission-driven", and one that is "working on problems that matter," I fail to see any of those problems, or how this organization has contributed to the solution. I mean, not even a link to "Solutions" or "Mission" or "About". Nada. I'm very curious to how this page looked [yesterday].

  Organizations that actually do stuff don't hesitate to put it front and center of their website, for example:

  - https://www.change.org/

  - https://www.planet.com/

  This is literally a sentence by sentence breakdown of everything on Meta.com at the time of this posting.

  > "Most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools that help us see and experiment in new ways."

  Great! Oh, this is just a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, linking to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. OK. Moving along.

  > Meta is joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

  OK, got it. There's a bunch of corporate speak that you'll see if you click it. I won't click it because I want to know what Meta does outside of the whole CZI thing.

  > Reserve a free account

  > Meta is a tool that helps researchers understand what is happening globally in science and shows them where science is headed. Pending shareholder and court approval, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta to help bring its technologies to the entire scientific community.

  Sign up now to reserve your free account.

  Neat! If you go to https://meta.science/reserve, where you actually can reserve you'll see more CZI stuff. Again, there's no indication of what these people do, in practice.

  > Join a mission-driven organization working on problems that matter

  Awesome! Oh, wait, this is just a link to their hiring page.

  What exactly do these people do, specifically? Sure they "help researchers understand what is happening globally", but that's so vague. Google and Wikipedia technically do that too in a way.

  [1] http://meta.com/

• by igravious on 1/23/17, 9:01 PM

  AI for Science, but not for the Arts & Humanities.

  With that slight snark I applaud this philanthropic move. :/

  Tried out Meta once but couldn't get it to surface similar material to a set that I fed it. I don't need Meta to recommend by citations, I need it to recommend by topical similarity.

  Still though, props to team Zuck and I can see Meta complementing G Scholar or possibly supplanting it.

• by kriro on 1/24/17, 6:48 AM

  I'm troubled by the fact that they cannot open the tool immediately and that it will take "some time". I also don't see the value proposition over say Google Scholar+alerts or Researchgate trends. Wait and see I guess. The current website doesn't have much information other than the fact that Meta got bought and some generic blurbs.

  I'd much rather see Zuckerberg buy out an entire niche of science journals and Open Access them and keep them that way while keeping the high standards and impact factor in tact. Bioinformatics would have been a decent fit. I think freeing domains one by one with wads of tech-donor-$$$ might be the easiest stept towards open science.

• by cing on 1/23/17, 10:18 PM

  "All of Biohub's findings -- along with everything that is studied in the Chan Zuckerberg Science initiative -- will be open source and available to all." [1]

  I wonder if this extends to Meta?

  [1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/21/chan-zuckerberg-initiati...

• by divbit on 1/23/17, 11:41 PM

  Facebook have produced a surprising amount of powerful tools recently, so getting into the research (as in research tools) space seems like it should be good for all (and obviously if they are deeply into AI research, having a good indexing tool is crucial).

• by Negative1 on 1/23/17, 11:58 PM

  Would it be accurate to say that Meta is essentially a social network for researchers and scientists?

• by bamboozled on 1/24/17, 7:08 AM

  Here is another "Chan Zuckerberg" initiative I'm sure everyone will be proud of: Hawaiians call Mark Zuckerberg 'the face of neocolonialism' over land lawsuits

  It seems greed knows no bounds. Throwing money at things is not charity.

  [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-zuck...