Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
For me, it was "Erasure Coding in Windows Azure Storage" 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're operating a large Ceph cluster, or you're Google/Amazon/Microsoft and you're running GCS/S3/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'm surprised how little attention this paper has gotten in the wild.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/LRC12-cheng20webpage.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...</a>