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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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...

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

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.

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/

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.

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

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

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