Top all-time · #2676
Paul Biggar
Personal blog · blog.paulbiggar.com · on HN as pbiggarprogrammingpolitics
Paul Biggar's personal blog at blog.paulbiggar.com covers programming and politics. Since 2010, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “I Can't Sleep”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Founder: Tech for Palestine, Darklang, CircleCI
Most-linked posts?
- I Can't Sleep9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2023-12-14
- Why We Shut Newstilt Down5 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2010-09-16
- Meta and Lavender5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-04-16
- A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular.2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-02-08
- Tech for Palestine2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-02
What Hacker News says?
This is no surprise. I raised the flag last year on Whatsapp being used as part of the genocide in Gaza [1] following the +972 article [2] on Lavender. This was an opportunity for Meta to signal that it wasn't in support of its technologies being used this way, to do top-to-bottom public audit of how this came to be and to prevent it from ever happening again. Instead, Meta had an incredibly scummy response [3]. The…
Comment linking /meta-and-lavender/
on “Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices”Submitted A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular. as a story · 146 points
HN discussionTotally agree about flaming out hard. I wrote [1] after my last startup failed. It was actually two months between when it failed and when I could face actually writing it. However, it's professionally one of the best things I ever did. [1] http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...
Comment linking /archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
on “Zombie Startups”Submitted Why We Shut Newstilt Down as a story · 140 points
HN discussion> certainly better than, say, MRI Ruby Care to give some proof? Say, performance-wise, MRI is not any worse than PHP[1]. And as far as I understand, PHP implementation is just plain horrible[2]. [1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al... [2] http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/introducing-malicious-cod...
Comment linking /archive/introducing-malicious-code-reviews/
on “Ewww, You Use PHP?”Submitted Tech for Palestine as a story · 46 points
HN discussionI use these for footnotes, eg in [1] which had a lot of footnotes. Ghost and other blogs don't support footnoting well afaict. Sometimes I miss restructured text, which did this quite well, markdown alas does not. [1] https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/
Comment linking /i-cant-sleep/
on “Smarter Than 'Ctrl+F': Linking Directly to Web Page Content”Submitted Meta and Lavender as a story · 20 points
HN discussionSomehow this reminded me of a similar rant about devops: It’s the Future - https://blog.paulbiggar.com/its-the-future/ And now I see that's from June 2015 -- it's over 10 years old now! Wow I'm not sure we're really in a better place in the cloud now ... The article says I’m going back to Heroku and in 2025, I think people still want that
Comment linking /its-the-future/
on “Programming peaked”Submitted Meta and Lavendar as a story · 12 points
HN discussionBy the way, there is an alternative to HipHop that is actually easier to implement because it makes php extensions. It's called PHC http://phpcompiler.org and it's open source. It was Paul Biggar's PhD thesis http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/a-rant-about-php-compiler... It just needs some community contributions to catch up.
Comment linking /archive/a-rant-about-php-compilers-in-general-and-hiphop-in-particular/
on “Speeding up PHP with the HipHop VM”Submitted Meta and Lavender as a story · 12 points
HN discussionHere's my (long long) story: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down... Am now doing https://circleci.com , so it has a happy ending.
Comment linking /archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
on “Ask HN: Did your YC (or other incubator) startup fail? What are you doing now?”Submitted Sometimes YC gets it wrong Paul Biggar (NewsTilt) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI agree with the first paragraph of your comment. Another YC-backed startup called NewsTilt was trying to tackle this problem more directly, but failed soon after launching. http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...
Comment linking /archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
on “Does Paul Graham Get What He Asks For? [infographic]”Submitted Full optimizing compiler in a week with AI as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFWIW, I failed at YC (in that my company failed after doing YC). Here's my account: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down... . The relevant YC part: > YC had consulted and advised us every step of the way. When we had co-founder problems, they gracefully refused to take sides. When we wanted to make a new product, they advised us not to proceed without co-founders, and that we’d need to move t…
Comment linking /archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
on “Should We Do Y Combinator? We're further along than most”Submitted I Can't Sleep (2023) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think they are. Read this article, that the banner links to: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/
Comment linking /i-cant-sleep/
on “I'm excited about Darklang”Submitted Why would Facebook fire Peter Thiel? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis darklang project has been going on 5 years now. From my memory everyone quit or was laid off except the founder, who has been working on it as a one man band. But since the Israeli conflict he has publicly called out the VC industry and has become a sort of political warrior: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/ Overall I would stick to a normal language like Python over what this project is. It’s too ambi…
Comment linking /i-cant-sleep/
on “I'm excited about Darklang”Submitted I Can't Sleep as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI assume this is the post in question: https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645523 [flagged] - 124 points, 81 comments It reads like he knew what he was getting into. He chose to have a clear conscience and damn the consequences. That shows strength of character, which is a commendable quality.
Comment linking /i-cant-sleep/
on “Paul Biggar removed from CircleCI board for pro-Palestine blog post”Submitted Meta and Lavender as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIn my case, there were so many things suggesting that we quit that I'm surprised we didn't sooner: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down...
Comment linking /archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
on “Ask HN: How do you know when to quit your startup?”I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but was he really fired just for writing that blog post? ( https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/ ) That seems pretty crazy, although I suppose to play devil's advocate the ongoing, erm, 'conflict', was clearly interfering with his ability to output work ("I can't work. I code for 5 minutes before their bodies come back")
Comment linking /i-cant-sleep/
on “Paul Biggar removed from CircleCI board”Another person punished for expressing solidarity for Palestinians. See https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/
Comment linking /i-cant-sleep/
on “Paul Biggar removed from CircleCI board”For those missing context, Paul Biggar released a blog ( https://blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-sleep/ ) decrying what he saw as a massacre of Palestinians conducted by Israel, and supported by what he considered the overwhelmingly pro-zionist tech VC industry. He called out some of his own investors by name. Paul Graham has tweeted similarly, and also called out collusion in the tech/VC industry to silence Palestinian…
Comment linking /i-cant-sleep/
on “Paul Biggar removed from CircleCI board”Founders new to coding write horrible code. And that is ok! At the beginning the biggest risk is not writting terrible code you will regreat having written, let alone give maintance. The biggest risk is making something nobody wants. From my experience, the biggest issue comes after you get enough traction/money/funding to hire a team. This is where things can get really bad, when the founder thinks he actually know…
Comment linking /archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
on “Finding a Technical Cofounder”I wrote up my failed YC startup here: http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down... It was definitely a good move. More people read that blog post than heard about my startup in the first place, it got covered in loads of tech press, and people still ask me about it 2 years later. I get an email every few months thanking me for writing it, and I'm asked to do the occasional interview about it too.…
Comment linking /archive/why-we-shut-newstilt-down/
on “Ask HN: Survivor Bias. Why don't we focus more on startups that fail?”
