Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
For me, it was &quot;Erasure Coding in Windows Azure Storage&quot; from Microsoft Research (2016) [0]<p>The idea that you can achieve the same practical effect of a 3x replication factor in a distributed system, but only increasing the cost of data storage by 1.6x, by leveraging some clever information theory tricks is mind bending to me.<p>If you&#x27;re operating a large Ceph cluster, or you&#x27;re Google&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;Microsoft and you&#x27;re running GCS&#x2F;S3&#x2F;ABS, if you needed 50PB HDDs before, you only need 27PB now (if implementing this).<p>The cost savings, and environmental impact reduction that this allows for are truly enormous, I&#x27;m surprised how little attention this paper has gotten in the wild.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;research&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;LRC12-cheng20webpage.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;research&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;...</a>