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by nik61 3625 days ago
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Ms_fnd_in_a_Lbry.html
1 comments

Wow! Excellent read!.

It's even more impressive since the footnote says:

"This story first appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1961"

Fifty-five years ago!

It reminds me of a recent hn article (if anyone has a link it would be great!) that I believe it was about how Dropbox tests it's storage system, layer by layer, and the final error graph is always a flat line at "0", since every error is caught and corrected in one of the layers below.

Will it ever reach the case where it will be impossible to really guarantee that we have the right data?

PS: I can't seem to find the article using Algolia or even Google... maybe it was not Dropbox but other storage company? I really would like to find this story but for some reason never marked it as favorite or even upvoted it! (maybe I wasn't logged in).

Perhaps it was https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/07/pocket-watch/ ?

    > we use a variant on Reed-Solomon erasure coding that is similar to Local Reconstruction Codes
    > according to this model, a given block in Magic Pocket is safe with 99.9999999999999999999999999% probability!
Awesome! Yes, exactly that.

I tried searching for "petabyte" but I guess I came 1 order of magnitude short...

Thanks a lot! It was driving me crazy..