Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of http://n.io – their homepage is almost an homage to HBO's Silicon Valley.

Notable catch phrases: human ingenuity, interoperable connectivity, universal intelligence, distributed intelligence, Chip-to-cloud, unconditional interoperability, ...

"nio provides the technology to unleash your imagination"

View on HN

Unleashing my imagination is a terrifying idea. I have multiple safeguards in place to keep even the relatively harmless bad and dangerous ideas that live in my imagination from being able to escape.

"I take medication specifically to prevent the scenario you have described to me."

> Unleashing my imagination is a terrifying idea.

Yes, I remember at least one case [1] where that caused some issues :-).

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049223/

Also:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0420223

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4680182

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1727770

The reified imagination genre is rife with unintended consequences.

And the best for last:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995577/

I thought the book was pretty good- might just be me.

Reminds me of the gamer episode of Black Mirror.

Double irony on the careers page: "Speaking of our team members, instead of touting buzzwords and industry jargon about ping-pong tables or "rockstars" we went straight to the source." Then they call the team members "innovators". I don't think it's a joke though; if it is they put a lot of work into it.

Edit: The individual product pages are a lot more informative. Looks like they specialize in visual code editors and a platform for distributed apps.

And the "Team" page couldn't be more cliche-laden either.. lots of dogs and of course, "You should also know that we like dogs, office mini-golf, and breakfast burritos."

WTH it's hilarious that the once-harmless-banal-mild-infantilism of odd underdog side projects and garage up-starts has now infested every executive's/investor's mind such that they feel apparent competetive pressure to ensure a quip like the above will be "obligatorily" present. The only reason this sort of stuff was at first inspiring, "human touch", or exhilarating was because it contrasted so starkly with mainstream biz heuristics. No longer, so might as well all drop the pretend bouncy-castle-playground-mentality right now.

I'm one of those that abhors the Playskoolization of professional services (I don't fit in to that culture myself), don't buy into marketing and am not easily moved, but having sat through a ton of sales meetings from vendors that take both the infantile as well as the more traditional "adult" approaches-- the latter always comes across as cold and sterile, like we're just one more sale they need to make quota.

Product viability being equivalent, the decision comes down to "do I want to do business with some hipsters and their dogs, or do I want to do business with the Borg and their lawyers?"

The human approach still works.

I get that (although probably locale-dependent: biz people in my corner of the world rarely perceive each others as "borgs" and frankly also have little reason to =) but my musing here was more towards the inevitable pendulum swing that turns the whole "hipsters-with-dogs" aesthetic is turning into tomorrow's "lame sterile" (ie 2nd-hand, motion-performing) "borgs". =)

I like how this is stuff I "should know." Like something dire might happen if I don't know up front that I'm entering into a collaboration with people who prefer certain pets and food!

Although hold on, it dawns on me that they might be trying to say these are things in the actual workplace, i.e. it's loud and distracting and smells like burrito farts and (most likely unwashed) dogs. If that's the case, I actually do appreciate knowing up front. But even here they're being super vague. "I like dogs" is different from "I bring my dog to work." Is it the one or the other? Even if I wanted to bring my own dog to work, I still have no idea if that's okay. Don't make people guess!

"We specialize in visual code editors and a platform for distributed apps."

Missing from the home page.

I‘d actually like to be called innovator rather than Rockstar, as well as prefer working with innovators than people behaving like Rockstars...

EDIT:

(Besides that, i agree, realizing this was still the n.io thread after posting this, there’s definitely no reason to take this shop seriously...)

Almost, but not quite - based on their fuzzy descriptions, I had a feeling it's a similar area I do research and development in. Turns out I was right, but I had to find actual product documentation to confirm it: "nio is a highly-scalable stream processing engine that allows you to asynchronously process streaming data signals and act on them in real time. nio is the brain of your real-time application, particularly systems that require distributed processing." https://docs.n.io/getting_started/

Come on, that web site has to be a parody, even down to the dogs on the "Team" page.

If it's actually a real company, my best guess is they are a custom engineering software consultancy. Although on the other hand, they seem to have some sort of product you can download, but I can't tell what it does. It's all so confusing. Perfect example, whalesalad.

> even down to the dogs on the "Team" page.

They do get points for, "Gus - The Lead Software Barkitect"

It's not a parody it's a genre. There are many others out there.

Representative example: https://unroll.me/team/

Isn't https://unroll.me the service that was helping people unsubscribe from email lists, while selling their data to uber?

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/24/stop-using-unroll-me-rig...

Strangely I don't see any references on their site to Rakuten, the Japanese corporation that owns them. They also use all of the data they scrape from your emails across their huge catalog of companies.

Indeed, that's how I discovered that gem in the first place.

I think... its real, go to their blog page and they describe how to put nio into a rpi.

https://niolabs.com/blog/baking-nio-into-a-raspberry-pi/

I've spent far more time than I should have digging through their site... basically it looks like they've built a sort of labview/mindstorms type app? They have a library of "blocks" and they're trying to sell the "you don't need to be a programmer to build programs" feature. It actually looks quite fun - I don't get why they had to present it so absurdly

Perhaps it started as a joke and mistakenly became a business, like the fellow who got elected in Australia?

Also known from dhmo who's been mistaken for a legitimate source of information.

Their twitter has over 3000 tweets, and not all of them look like they were auto-generated or retweets.

If it's not real then I don't know why someone would go through all that trouble, unless it's real in the sense of existing solely for conning someone or acting as a front for a 3-letter agency or something.

EDIT: Yeah, it's definitely real. Their team page's link to CEO Twitter account has 14 400 tweets and 1st tweet features a video of a guy listed as one of their engineers.

They're on Crunchbase:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/niolabs

It's level 2 of Internet Startup Sock-Puppetry. You enable innovation, hyper-connectivity, distribution, and maybe you even empower interoperation of the iOT phase-space for individuals, companies and dogs. Throw in a coffee machine and a third-hand ping-pong table and some beanbag chairs. Don't forget the fancy conference room with lots of big-screen displays showing fancy graphs.

Oh dear, I forgot to include the cloud. And machine learning (in the cloud).

"This conference room table raised our valuation by $800K."

I'm happy I no longer live in Silly Valley.

Until today I was painfully unaware of how leashed my imagination has been.

Clearly you don't have enough "interoperability"

Their "Team" page takes a whooping 37s to fully load for me, and transfers 10 MB over 69 HTTP requests. This suggest an average download speed of ~275 KB/s, but I have a 40 Mbit/s download link. Just... wow.

"If you’re driven by curiosity, free coffee and an unwavering belief in technology as the lever of societal innovation, then check our careers page to see if niolabs is the place for you."

This is just too good.

Huh?

"Behind several years of research and development by the niolabs team, the nio platform was created to seamlessly enable innovation across the world’s biggest issues. As “things” become smarter, the opportunity for technology to provide transformational value becomes both real and increasingly complex. With no agenda or bias other than to provide a tool to deliver hyperconnectivity and intelligence on the user’s terms, nio simplifies the process of digital transformation."

http://nio.applytojob.com/apply/AGIOE2/Data-Architect

"no agenda"

That seems to sum it up.

What in the actual fuck?

That is really absurd. What a great example. "We are currently accepting applications for our early access program" early access to what?

Early access to the Imagination Unleasher 3000 apparently...

You won’t believe what we have coming next. No really, it’s unbelievable. Even I don’t believe it.

An iOT device that dispenses Unicorn Chow.

"That's Unicorn food? Looks like Froot Loops to me."

Well, duh. It's a prototype. We had to build the MVP first. As soon as we fill our Unicorn Hunter position, we'll be all set...

It's only missing a blockchain play.

Zombo.com V2.0. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxWwEPeUuAg for the famous zombo.com intro, without Flash)

> we love our Hawaiian shirt Fridays

Please no.

> nio is built to enhance human ingenuity, not limit it. Our products empower developers, system architects, designers, and hackers to build anything from rapid prototypes to smart cities and anything in-between.nio provides the technology to unleash your imagination.

I wonder why they themselves have not made all those smart cities from their wonderful technology. It sounds like an omnipotent force!

I would love to know what "heterogeneous humans" are. Dictionary definition: "originating outside the organism" - which sort of makes sense for, say, collection classes like arrays....I think I need a T-shirt: "I'm with Heterogeneous"

Hmm, they are local. I think I'll apply. :-D

Please let us know if something interesting happens as a result.

It looks like a Zapier FaaS Enterprise IoT thing.

When is there ICO ?

is this real? seems like a very elaborate joke

If it's a joke, its really elaborate, as here's their linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/9217038/. They list a Colorado address, not Silicon Valley too...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com