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]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.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).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.[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...