Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by speps 833 days ago
I'd recommend explaining even a tiny bit what erasure coding is. I had to look it up as I didn't know the term. It's really cool, explain it yourself, why you're excited about it!
1 comments

Sure, erasure coding is a form of error correcting codes that can be applied to data such that you can lose some n number of codes before you can successfully reconstruct the input data. For example, take k input symbols, and put it into an erasure code algorithm to get k+n symbols, where any n of the output symbols can be lost before you fail to be able to reconstruct the data. Symbols in this case can be some number of bits/bytes.

This is a really important property in situations where there can be big giant bursts of errors, because you can still reconstruct the data regardless. IIRC, CDs/DVDs/BDs all use two concatenated Reed Solomon (a type of erasure coding) coded symbols that are then interleaved with each other, which provides the disk protection against things like accidental scratches.

Nice! Add that to the README ;)
Done! Thank you, for it never occurred to me someone might stumble upon my software without already knowing (a dumb lapse of mind, I know).