Hacker Read

some-guy · 2015-11-06 20:47:04+00:00

Yeah I think that's not obvious from the title of the article: 24/192 are useful downloads for the sake of editing.

cnvogel | karma 2254 | avg karma 2.88 · | 2015-09-02 12:40:56+00:00

Yes, but on the other hand it's a good reminder for everyone processing user provided files to sanity check or convert them to a canonical format in a sandboxes and resource limited process.

dymk | karma 8044 | avg karma 2.72 · | 2022-03-10 06:46:27

It’s only 23,000 options, a plaintext file would work fine. Computers are fast.

zellyn | karma 4312 | avg karma 4.24 · | 2018-12-12 14:51:33

In the article, they did this at the file level.

orthoxerox | karma 2256 | avg karma 2.44 · | 2023-08-26 02:26:46

That's what files are for.

nraynaud | karma 3750 | avg karma 1.83 · | 2022-10-11 05:00:58

I was a bit dumbfounded by the article because I forgot that a.out is a format before being a filename.

davidgrenier | karma 370 | avg karma 1.42 · | 2022-01-09 04:29:54

Yes, my productive editor becomes useless with that kind of file content.

sedatk | karma 4557 | avg karma 2.78 · | 2016-12-28 10:41:18+00:00

i don't think it's specific to a file format.

andybak | karma 19613 | avg karma 3.44 · | 2021-11-14 15:33:04

Wrong use case. I'm talking about asking them to write it edit these files.

jstimpfle | karma 3971 | avg karma 1.31 · | 2019-07-21 23:50:03

That's true for regular files as well.

coldacid | karma 1243 | avg karma 1.59 · | 2021-10-14 13:06:33

Given that other recent article about university students who don't know what files are, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if this is considered esoteric.

eikenberry | karma 3875 | avg karma 2.15 · | 2019-06-04 21:22:07

I've found them useful for settings the filetype when you don't have the mime-suffix or other easy method to identify it. But that's about it.

blablabla123 | karma 1744 | avg karma 1.13 · | 2019-11-09 11:58:41+00:00

It is pointless, also nobody ever cares much how well a text editor can handle obscure text files (file too large, broken encoding, ....) What matters is how it handles well-formatted files, the others aren't worth opening in an editor anyways :)

chriswarbo | karma 7592 | avg karma 2.33 · | 2014-06-15 21:55:48

> No type-system will magically know ahead of time what the contents of the file will be before you run the program.

Yes they can, it's known as 'type providers'. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2013/01/30/twelve-type...

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tamana | karma 1354 | avg karma 1.2 · | 2016-07-20 12:10:58

It's metadata. It's as obscure as file permissions bits.

Geezus_42 | karma 183 | avg karma 0.99 · | 2021-04-10 14:46:55+00:00

You can edit them, there just text files.

Zetobal | karma 1154 | avg karma 1.24 · | 2023-11-01 17:18:21

Funny that it's provided in one of the most dangerous filetypes.

icebraining | karma 48925 | avg karma 2.14 · | 2016-04-27 02:35:11

So what? They're just files.

kevincox | karma 12943 | avg karma 3.08 · | 2022-03-23 05:43:05

I think people need to use text files less. Or at least stop hard-wapping them.

timbit42 | karma 1404 | avg karma 0.61 · | 2018-12-15 17:09:40+00:00

File extensions aren't limited to 3 characters these days.