<i>> Cauchy matrices are more foolproof, which is why I started with them.</i><p>I always wanted to know but was afraid to ask. I see why people choose Cauchy for encoding: it's simple and fast (<i>more foolproof</i>? - that I don't see). However, Cauchy erasure decoding would always involve matrix inversion, which is not as simple and fast (Hadoop 3.0 is a good example). But what do people do when they want to do <i>error</i> correction after Cauchy encoding?