skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Full text of his statement:

(This is for Groupon employees, but I’m posting it publicly since it will leak anyway)

People of Groupon,

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.

You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we’ve shared over the last few months, and I’ve never seen you working together more effectively as a global company – it’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.

For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be – I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.

If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness – don’t waste the opportunity!

I will miss you terribly.

Love,

Andrew
> Other countries have outlawed HFCS. There's no reason that our government shouldn't.

Nothing in your post appears to justify a ban on HFCS. Are "it gets used in foods you wouldn't expect" and "other countries ban it" justification enough? I'm not trying to defend HFCS, but if you're going to call for something to be banned, you need to provide better reasoning.
You make a very good point: between tariffs, subsidies, FDA and UDSA regulations, etc., the government has effectively shaped the US food industry into what it is today. However, that doesn't mean it would be a good idea to ban HFCS. But I agree we should stop subsidizing it.
Here's a copy of his statement.

--

(This is for Groupon employees, but I’m posting it publicly since it will leak anyway)

People of Groupon,

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today. If you’re wondering why… you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our own expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.

You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that. A fresh CEO earns you that chance. The board is aligned behind the strategy we’ve shared over the last few months, and I’ve never seen you working together more effectively as a global company – it’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise.

For those who are concerned about me, please don’t be – I love Groupon, and I’m terribly proud of what we’ve created. I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.

If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness – don’t waste the opportunity!

I will miss you terribly.

Love,

Andrew
It's not exactly the worst thing Wal-Mart does. Maybe now their employees will be able to afford the mental and physical strength to change or displace Wal-Mart.
Interesting non-answer on the whole RapGenius debacle - very politician-like move to talk about "respect" and not actually address the serious technical issues.

I think he's a bit too touchy-feely and not enough make-it-worky.
I've done that to a friend before. Created a Facebook fan page in his name and got 1000 "Likes" from fiverr.com. Was a pretty funny gag.
Well, atleast he's getting some vitamins and minerals.

Eating fruit is better than drinking fresh fruit juice, which is better than drinking Mountain Dew.
From his twitter account:

Yesterday:
"Three oranges in a meeting with four of us?
No question - I give my oranges to the others.
#leadership"

15 minutes ago:
"For Groupon Employees: https://www.jottit.com/v5wux/
(Apparently, sharing oranges is necessary but
insufficient #leadership)"

I'm sure he's not everyone's cup of tea, but I would totally work with this guy.
This could work, rolling-release + LTS. Archlinux seems to be doing quite well under the rolling-release auspice, so why not.

Of course, never in my experience has rolling-release ever worked in anything close to production environments - it's what killed FreeBSD in the data centre, however, if you're a techie with some time on your hands it could be cool.
The Internet’s Best Placeholder Image Sites for Web Development
These are always interesting articles, but rarely of practical value. Performance is only one concern of a website project. I've found that a greater risk by far is predictable modularization, a topic with much less "engineering" attention. Any decent-sized project is going to have to decompose their presentation declarations info manageable artifacts, which has the unwanted side-effect of spreading out existing selectors across multiple files. Add to this a tight project timeframe, several engineers that treat CSS as a second-rate language (as almost all that I've encountered do, worsening the more senior they are), and CSS' lack of selector-spacing (in the namespace sense), and you have a recipe for thermonuclear battles over selector specificity.

Selector and naming conventions can basically eliminate this problem. Module root elements have a class name that starts with a letter; module nested elements have a class name that starts with a dash. These are combined with the child selector to constrain their applicability.

What was once super-ambiguous, e.g.

body { color: black; }
.menu .item { color: orange; }
.menu .item .menu { color: black; }
.menu .item .menu .item { color: orange; }
/* and on */

is now very precise:

body { color: black; }
.menu > .-item { color: orange; }

Is it the most efficiently interpreted ruleset? No, and I don't care. It's the most efficiently manageable ruleset. (Web Components will probably obviate this.)
The problem is, people do know that their "grilled chicken stripes [are] stuffed with sugar". McDonalds is unhealthy. Do not buy processed foods. Buy simple, fresh, unprocessed foods. A whole chicken, rice, and fresh broccoli can feed a family of up to 8-9 for under $20. There are very easy ways to eat healthy for cheap without ever having to resort to sketchy Tyson pre-packaged chicken, or suspicious Wonder Bread.

There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. If it isn't, then that's fine, but don't go blaming other people for your misallocation of personal resources.
Twitter open sources Java Streaming API Client
Andrew Mason is out as Groupon’s CEO
I remember watching a talk where speaker claimed it's not easy to find just some bread without added fructose at a grocery store nowadays.

Solution: don't eat any bread.

I've been on the Paleo diet for a couple weeks and am loving it. I cook my own meals now, and whenever I get a sweet tooth I just pop open a can of pineapple chunks.

Bread was invented when agriculture was invented. But our body wasn't designed (by evolution) to process a diet of agriculture. It can process it, just like a car can run on corn starch, but it's probably not very good for the system.
It was already down 25% for the day.
My guess is it's because of the way the site is setup on heroku with regards to SSL.
Arch has been overall very good for me, but there have been breakages (and I experienced a whole lot more with Gentoo, though that was a while ago). Arch's systemd migration in particular was somewhat painful and the documentation wasn't great for the process (it has improved somewhat since). I seriously doubt that Ubuntu would expect their users to do what I had to do to apply that update (since Arch and Ubuntu serve very different target audiences). This is no knock on Arch, their approach is appropriate for their audience.

Because Ubuntu serves such a different target audience, I expect the whole update process will be more hands-free and possibly a little more smooth. Their mission is "Linux for Human Beings" instead of "Linux for hackers and enthusiasts", so this is a necessity.
Pretty classic case of 'the blame has to land somewhere' after their abysmal performance since IPO. Considering the stock price/performance vs. expectations investors see any change as positive.
Loader.io - Simple Cloud-based Load Testing
That didn't work out so perfectly for AOL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program
Groupon to Replace CEO
To me, it is unclear if the first-person narrative is a literary device, or refers to the author. I am really confused. I wish someone could clarify.
Innovation Should Not Slow You Down
I was thinking more in terms of glycogen and lipid getting burned up during exercise. Whatever glucose you can't use gets converted in one way or another. I'm sure there are nuances, and it's been a while since I had to be able to recite the TCA pathway, but isn't fructose converted to glycogen? So, can't it be burned for energy like anything else? It's one of the metabolites for the TCA cycle, right?

Not to mention, this article (and this thread) are all playing fast and loose with all sorts of scientific terminology... :)
Read the title as 'Comet might hit in March 2014' followed by '50 km' and almost choked to death on my morning Espresso.
It's extremely dangerous to excuse someone of not wishing to make conscious, good decisions.
Too bad for Mason. IMHO they should have sold to Google when they had the chance. There are many folks who applauded the decision to decline the offer. Build for the long-term, they said. In general I agree with that sentiment. But when you have a $6B offer on the table, you gotta put the kool-aid aside and be very objective about the future prospects for your company.
Wait, what? Volunteering in general or even open source or community software projects makes plenty of sense, but why the hell would anyone volunteer for a private for-profit like Dropbox?

Is it some kind of internship scam?
Its not a nice situation and I can understand why it is stressful, but you are right, I can't empathise entirely. Perhaps most shocking is the great amount of mental resolve required for suicide - which surely is the same that makes this sort of situation effectively non-threatening.

Still, personal feelings are largely irrelevant here - its pretty incredible to me that anyone can give a shit about this with, e.g. gun laws that enable the US to be responsible for 95% of child death by gun outside of warzones for instance. Changing that law will save thousands of children from death - I consider that infinitely more important than some kind of maybe, possibly a potential restriction on freedom if you want to interpret it that way...

Incidentally I find it interesting how this comment has been controversial - I was expecting it to be downvoted to death because it is obviously offensive and callous, but it has received quite a few more up votes than down.
Isn't the BIOS supposed to be a mini-OS. It provides a common interface for different hardware platforms so software works on all of them.
Of course then our address space increased, so you can only use many of those BIOS features in real mode. Then modern OS's reimplented those BIOS features.
What we have now is an old mini-OS that has been hacked around to run modern OSes. UEFI is a welcome solution to that problem.
Parents are parents. Straight parents are parents. Gay parents are parents. There's no fundamental difference.
As a fellow Northwestern grad it disappointing to see him go, but as a lover of Chicago its probably for the best. I'd really love to see GroupOn succeed and help anchor a diversified tech presence in the city. We have some great startups, but you need big public companies in the same way a mall needs a Macys, Nordstrom, etc.
To be fair, this is an alpha release. I wouldn't expect it to be ready for primetime quite yet.
A small but finite amount of dust could fall in the range of initially traveling at escape velocity but then slowed to orbital velocity by the scant atmospheric drag. But definitely not 1000 years of opaque orbital debris.

Anyway, I would think atmospheric dust storms as the post-impact pressure wave cycles around the plant would make Mars more messy in the hypothetical aftermath than any orbital debris.
This seems.. problematic. They don't do anything to verify you own the site in question. What happens when someone aims this at facebook.com?
It's pretty much how the Apple support forums work.
I don't disagree with you. Please look at what I was replying to.

Saying, "because it's a good story," doesn't address the question that this thread started with.

And the format of HN is very, very clear. Don't try to pretend that it is meant to be one's sole source of news.
> There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it.

For some people, McDonalds is cheaper than the healthy alternatives and they simply can't avoid it even though they'd like to. I know that's hard to believe but there you go.
Well at some point the board has to act or risk becoming the target of a shareholder lawsuit.
This is not entirely true. A very large percentage of spam (70-90%) is stopped at or before the banner, at a layer he probably doesn't control (unless he runs his entire email infrastructure).
"My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers."

Otoh Meg Whitman has said something like "if you can't measure it you can't manage it".
Honestly if there was more of a proliferation of this kind of news instead of the constant barrage of negativity and fear that is pushed upon us through mainstream propaganda er... media channels then perhaps we wouldn't need the TSA with their hands up our butts feeling around for shit that isn't there... pun intended.
It's very shrewd/dishonest to say that your company is in its Apple ][ phase. It leads the audience to believe that in the future, you will be as successful as Apple is today.
>>> The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration. To fulfill its mission, the agency must respond to this information by re-evaluating the toxicity of sugar, arriving at a daily value — how much added sugar is safe? — and ideally removing fructose (the “sweet” molecule in sugar that causes the damage) from the “generally recognized as safe” list, because that’s what gives the industry license to contaminate our food supply."

Oh fer cryin out loud, just try to educate people a little better on how to MODERATE intake of everything, don't go overboard here and try to get a ban on sugar.... What is this world coming to when everybody expects some bigger force to make all the decisions for them and keep them safe. Learn how to think for yourselves and take some vested interest in you actions and decisions. Gotta strike a balance between natural selection and idiotracy I suppose...
Debian also has a roughly 2 year release frequency. 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011. Stable is already frozen so 2013 is likely.
I'd like to thank you for bringing some sanity into this thread, and (hopefully) provoking some of the commenters here into doing some further reading.

The kind of thought process that causes someone to go "Fructose is a sugar, fructose is in fruit, article says sugar is bad, therefore article says fruit is bad!!11one" is quite frustrating to watch. The levels of uninformed snark in this thread is quite depressing, and is one of the main reasons I usually prefer not to see non-technical discussions on HN.

(Not that I know any better, but I recognise my lack of knowledge and attempt to address it before spouting forth opinions.)
You would expect this answer from the COO or CEO, you get technical answers from the CTO, but when you have a PR problem you trot out the CEO/COO.
"for the way he's handling "

Assumes he wrote the statement and wasn't helped by PR people of course. In that case he gets credit for at least listening to those more experienced than he is.

Can't tell without seeing his reaction in other situations that are similar of course.
Credit for the Godfather references!
Your app crashed from the traffic
I like that idea. I might start doing that.
Wouldn't it be better to setup a new nickname/alias for your account? A bit tedious but then you wouldn't be getting every single xxxxx@example.com
Great opportunity for a company with huge reach to move in a completely different direction.
"Naive" is an overly polite way of describing ideas which lead in with an idea that flies in the face of pretty much the whole history of Linux.
I changed my mail server to accept . instead of +'s so now the emails I generate work through pretty much any validation.
"If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through."

Wow, that's actually kinda a perfect analogy. I totally understand.
Indeed - that's a really well written letter.

(Though cynical-me wonders how much of it is heartfelt and honest, and how much of it is carefully engineered spin - crafted and chosen by a team of psychologists/marketers. About the only admirable thing about Groupon, at least to me, is their magnificent use of language to persuade and influence both buyers and sellers of Groupon deals.)
Second on namecheap. I use them for all my domains and they don't do any wildcard routing.
It's actually _not_ because their validation sucks, but because salespeople decided that it means you won't read their newsletter or other spam. They understand the situation as - hi, this is my email please use that subaddress so I can mark it as spam (yes, I know that spam filters don't need subadresses - but try to explain it to an average salesdude - I've tried).
If you've ever seen, read, listened to anything from this guy, you know he doesn't use PR people. Trust me, this is straight from his mouth/mind.
if len(request.pipeline):

you want to execute only if it has a length.

cool though, I am using pipelines for something at work and read this post and realized I was executing even if there was nothing to execute!
Really heart warming. Also makes me wonder how they handled the financial challenges of raising a child as a young social worker and playwright couple in new york.
AccelJava: Embed C in Java, no JNI
How Mozilla’s Web-Centric Firefox Mobile OS Will Stop Malicious Web Apps
This is fantastic letter. If we could all get fired so gracefully.
What's the point of interim co-CEOs? Seems like an odd move.
I have used both extensively on both personal and work-related projects. Both are great, but Foundation gets my vote as it is lighter and much easier to work with as a designer. With Bootstrap, you are pretty much stuck with that general look unless you want to do A LOT of work. You will end up looking like every other app out there using it.

With Foundation, it is much easier to override their styling and build something that is unique. You feel more like you are working WITH a framework, as opposed to working AGAINST one - which is how I feel using Bootstrap.

Either way, you can't go wrong, but if you value saving time by not overriding a million CSS rules when designing your site - go with Foundation.
What is appreciative thinking?
I think investors are just desperate for any signs of change. This is one such sign.
Ask HN: HN clone in PHP?
Is there any HN clone that written in PHP?
I've heard from a lot in the Chicago startup community that was a ruse to get Microsoft to buy them (Google didn't offer 6B, but played along), playing on the stereotype that Microsoft goes for Google's scraps.
This has to be one of the most honest dismissal statements I've ever read. Major props to him.
Fusion: Power, Water, Food, soon
People buy crap. They buy on taste, they buy on price, they buy on marketing. The problem, in fact, is the consumer. Demand will always be filled, and demand is not subject to law.

Here in China, I witnessed a commercial, western-style, pre-packaged apple juice drink yesterday that was sold for 6元 (just under 1USD) for 500mL. On further inspection, it contained 10% 'real' apple juice (which could mean anything...), some artificial flavoring and colouring, glucose syrup, aspartame, and preservatives. They must be making a killing: it was 90% water. Health impact? People used to drink tea - you be the judge.
That's a bit like saying passwords and PINs are bad from a UX perspective. In a way, you're right, because any user flow gets simpler and smoother if you remove a password prompt, but it's pretty obvious why these things still need to exist.
It was when I posted this - You're right about the // business though. I was attempting to avoid the re-submission detection, but failed pitifully :)
Are you affiliated with Tonido, or just really into Dropbox alternatives? Your submission history seems a little too focused.
Groupon Removes Andrew Mason as CEO, Appoints Lefkofsky, Leonsis
I think many people know by know sugar is "toxic" and is responsible for pandemic obesity, type 2 diabetes and 99% of the dental mafia, erm... industry; at least I for one preach against sugar every time there's a discussion on diets and food.

This might have just reached a level where authorities need to get their shit together and do something about it... And this is the sad and hard part as many of our politicians may be "subsidised" by the food industry.
I doubt you can attribute any dramatic rise in after hours stock price to actual 'investors' deciding to place buy orders seconds after hearing the news.

The after hours action is most likely driven by the many algorithmic trading systems making trades based on news flow.

In other words, we'll have to wait for some rational period of time before deciding if traditional buy and hold investors are excited by this change in leadership.