undefined | Better HN

0 pointstimsally10y ago0 comments

Can you be more specific? If you have a partial piece of data (say because the data was streaming and a rocket exploded), the parser for that data is unlikely to work out of the box. Hence the use of a hex editor.

0 comments

anotherangrydev10y ago

Yeah, but why not write your own temporary parser or whatever. They (should) have top-class software engineers in there, why they don't just make a quick and dirty script to sort out whatever they're looking for?

IDK, that tweet felt like when you're watching a movie and then the 'hacker' comes around and you see a lot of props on the screen that are designed to excite 'geeks'. Like, right now, a lot of guys should be like: "OMG OMG! They are looking at the hex code directly! Damn, that is so looooooow-level, they call it rocket science for a reason!"

Anyway, hopefully they find the problem; whether with hex editors or not SpaceX is really doing cool stuff.

ygra10y ago

Some hex editors allow you to actually define an ad-hoc data format to parse, e.g. http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/templates.html – it doesn't have to be ed(1) for hex data. Besides, it could just have been a choice of words meant to convey that they have a bunch of incomplete/corrupted data that needs manual interpretation.

mikeash10y ago

How are you going to figure out how to write that quick and dirty script without looking at the raw data in a hex editor to figure out how it's been corrupted?

Far from BS, pointing a hex editor at your data dump sounds like the very first thing you'd do when you get some data that your software can't immediately read.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse