HN

Comments (20)

• zX41ZdbW
  I've also built a visualizer into ClickHouse, so we can analyze its binary: https://play.clickhouse.com/binary?user=binary - which code takes more space, what dependencies are too big, or what template instantiations are bloated.
• Menu

  dejobaan
  Pretty neat. It tangentially reminds me of when we used to be able to hear HDDs clatter away, or waaaaay back when we used be able to hear EM interference from whatever was going on in a computer.There was an episode of Cowboy Bebop, where a mechanic held a wrench against an engine cowling to see how much it vibrated (likely a real thing people do with real engines?) and, of course, the computer sounds in the Enterprise-D, along with blinkenlights.All this seems like the same kind of "translate data into a form humans can perceive." I'm not sure what immediate value this utility has, but I like it.
• andai
  I made my own binary visualizer when I was learning C. I had a for-loop which generated a texture by just setting the pixels based on the bytes in the file.I had two modes, monochrome (the bits) and grayscale (the bytes).Anyway funny thing happened, I had a buffer overflow and my program ended up visualizing its own memory.Actually I had the same error another time, I was trying to make a simple Terraria clone (like 2D Minecraft) and the terrain ended up rendering my mouse coordinates interpreted as booleans or something.C is fun!
• Jare
  This brings back memories! In 93 I wrote something similar (simpler) for MSDOS, to inspect and extract pieces of binary files, GFV (still downloadable from the Hornet archive somewhere in here https://www.hornet.org/cgi-bin/ha_search.cgi?opt_s=5:Iguana). You could set the stride and show 1/n bytes, so it was relatively easy to find textures from game files and memory dumps of running games.
• EvanAnderson
  Discussion from a few days ago that had links to more visualization tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423878
• max8539
  Did the same in 2015s with PHP, was so surprised to find an image inside explorer.exe file. It was an embedded BMP picture which I could see without even a picture viewer tool!
• jakiestfu
  Not exactly the same but https://runhexed.com allows you to create binary visualizations online
• NoItsDanger
  I’m waiting for one of these random pixelized images to start pulsing and spit out a glider
• Menu

  cowthulhu
  Does the uniformity indicate that the files are space-inefficient, and would benefit from compression?
• Menu

  bflesch
  It looks neat but I have no idea how the clustering works or why uniform colors are assigned to large areas, e.g. the color blue in the pdf example.
• ButlerianJihad
  “You get used to it; I don’t even see the code.“All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead…”https://youtu.be/fBDifUjNzbQ?is=7d43YcQZ8PVhFX11
• trsthales
  [flagged]