Joe Petviashvili

A routine update from Symantec Security Response wreaked havoc on a California company's clientele this week when it inadvertently tagged a program produced by Solid Oak Software as a virus and cut off the Internet access of Solid Oak customers.

“Dollars and cents seem real and physical enough for many people. If processes affecting money flows do not qualify as producing a physical transformation, it seems impossible to imagine that a process would qualify where it only scores virtual documents more...

“Shirky’s Law states that the social software most likely to succeed has “a brutally simple mental model … that’s shared by all users”.”

“The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided.”

“Software is like nothing else in the history of human endeavor unlike everything else we have ever built, software costs nothing to manufacture, and it never wears out.”

Developers working on Web Software supporting multiple users or profiles can use CookiePie to simultaneously test their software with each user without needing to open a different browser.

Every programmer with a few years' experience or education has heard the phrase "premature optimization is the root of all evil." This famous quote by Sir Tony Hoare (popularized by Donald Knuth) has become a best practice among software engineers.

Eating your own dog food is the quaint name that we in the computer industry give to the process of actually using your own product.

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at more...

“Write a Named Point class with three members: two floating point values for the coordinates on an X-Y plane, and a name represented as a 'char *'.” -- what could go wrong?

Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world; even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and impacts customer trust. The Amazon.com platform, which provides more...

So the question “how can I repay a loan with interest; where does the extra money come from?” becomes “how can someone give back more wealth than they were loaned; where does the extra wealth come from?”.

Homo logicus are driven by an irresistible desire to understand how things work. By contrast, Homo sapiens have a strong desire for success.

So let's be completely clear: when you buy a new Mac, you're buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you to run OS X software.

This is roughly like looking at Bach’s DNA and hearing the Little Fugue in your head.