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kluge around
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kluge up
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kluge
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kluge aroundvt.
To avoid a bug or difficult condition by inserting akluge. Compareworkaround.
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kluge up
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Knights of the Lambda Calculus
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kluge around
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= K =
kluge upvt.
To lash together a quick hack to perform a task; this is milder thancruft togetherand has some of the connotations ofhack up(note, however, that the construction `kluge on' corresponding tohack onis never used). "I've kluged up this routine to dump the buffer contents to a safe place."
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Knights of the Lambda Calculus
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knobs
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kluge up
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Knights of the Lambda Calculusn.
A semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. The name refers to a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which LISP is intimately connected. There is no enrollment list and the criteria for induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer has been known to give out buttons and, in general, themembersknow who they are....
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knobs
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Knuth
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Knights of the Lambda Calculus
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knobspl.n.
Configurable options, even in software and even those you can't adjust in real time. Anything you cantwiddleis a knob. "Has this PNG viewer got an alpha knob?" Software may be described as having "knobs and switches" or occasionally "knobs and lights".
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Knuth
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koan
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knobs
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Knuth/ka-nooth'/ n.
[Donald E. Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming"] Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or algorithms. A safe answer when you do not know: "I think you can find that in Knuth." Contrastthe literature. See alsobible. There is a Donald Knuth home page athttp://www-cs-faculty.Stanford.EDU/~knuth.
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koan
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kremvax
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Knuth
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koan/koh'an/ n.
A Zen teaching riddle. Classically, koans are attractive paradoxes to be meditated on; their purpose is to help one to enlightenment by temporarily jamming normal cognitive processing so that something more interesting can happen (this practice is associated with Rinzei Zen Buddhism). Hackers are very fond of the koan form and compose their own koans for humororous and/or enlightening effect. SeeSome AI Koans,has the X nature,hacker humor.
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kremvax
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kyrka
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kremvax/krem-vaks/ n.
[from the then large number ofUsenetVAXenwith names of the formfoovax] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax weremoskvaxandkgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries perpetrated on Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time.
In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in Moscow,demos.su, joined Usenet. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just another prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by blandly asserting that hewasa hoax!
Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site namedkremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into fact and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for this lexicon. --ESR]
In an even more ironic historical footnote,kremvaxbecame an electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centered onkremvaxbecame the only trustworthy news source for many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings included immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup and eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain its grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer networking were proved devastatingly accurate -- and the originalkremvaxjoke became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of `glasnost' and `perestroika' madekremvaxone of the timeliest means of their outreach to the West.
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kyrka
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lace card
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kyrka/chur'ka/ n.
[Swedish] Seefeature key.
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The Jargon Lexicon
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lace card
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lag
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kyrka
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lace cardn. obs.
Apunched cardwith all holes punched (also called a `whoopee card' or `ventilator card'). Card readers tended to jam when they got to one of these, as the resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to produce these things owing to power-supply problems. When some practical joker fed a lace card through the reader, you needed to clear the jam with a `card knife' -- which you used on the joker first.
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lag
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lagn.
[MUD, IRC; very common] When used without qualification this is synomous withnetlag. Curiously, people will often complain "I'm really lagged" when in fact it is their server or network connection that is lagging.
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lamer
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language lawyer
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lamern.
[prob. originated in skateboarder slang] 1. Synonym forluser, not used much by hackers but common amongwarez d00dz, crackers, andphreakers. A person who downloads much, but who never uploads. (Also known as `leecher'). Opposeelite. Has the same connotations of self-conscious elitism that use ofluserdoes among hackers. 2. Someone who tries to crack a BBS. 3. Someone who annoys the sysop or other BBS users - for instance, by posting lots of silly messages, uploading virus-ridden software, frequently dropping carrier, etc.
Crackers also use it to refer to crackerwannabees. In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. Inwarez d00dzculture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old (old in this context is read as a few years to anything older than 3 days).
`Lamer' is also much used in the IRC world in a similar sense to the above.
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language lawyer
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languages of choice
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language lawyern.
A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that together imply the answer to your question "if only you had thought to look there". Comparewizard,legal,legalese.
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languages of choice
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LART
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languages of choicen.
C,C++,LISP, andPerl. Nearly every hacker knows one of C or LISP, and most good ones are fluent in both. C++, despite some serious drawbacks, is generally preferred to other object-oriented languages (though in 1999 it looks as thoughJavahas displaced it in the affections of hackers, if not everywhere). Since around 1990 Perl has rapidly been gaining favor, especially as a tool for systems-administration utilities and rapid prototyping.Python, Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities.
There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known asReal Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story of Mel" in Appendix A). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything butHLLimplementation,glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages likePascalandAda, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (seebondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected withCOBOLor other traditionalcard walloperlanguages as a total and unmitigatedloss.
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LART
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larval stage
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LART//
Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool. 1. n. In the collective mythos ofscary devil monastery, this is an essential item in the toolkit of everyBOFH. The LART classic is a 2x4 or other large billet of wood usable as a club, to be applied upside the head of spammers and other people who cause sysadmins more grief than just naturally goes with the job. Perennial debates rage onalt.sysadmin.recoveryover what constitutes the truly effective LART; knobkerries, semiautomatic weapons, flamethrowers, and tactical nukes all have their partisans. Compareclue-by-four. 2. v. To use a LART. Some would add "in malice", but some sysadmins do prefer to gently lart their users as a first (and sometimes final) warning. 3. interj. Calling for one's LART, much as a surgeon might call "Scalpel!". 4. interj. [rare] Used inflames as a rebuke. "LART! LART! LART!"
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larval stage
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lase
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larval stagen.
Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hourhacking runin a given week; neglect of all other activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2 years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so afflicted never resume a more `normal' life, but the ordeal seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed to merely competent) programmers. See alsowannabee. A less protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting about a month) may recur when one is learning a newOSor programming language.
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lase
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laser chicken
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lase/layz/ vt.
To print a given document via a laser printer. "OK, let's lase that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro calls did the right things."
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laser chicken
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lasherism
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laser chickenn.
Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it `laser chicken' for two reasons: It canzapyou just like a laser, and the sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams. The dish has also been called `gunpowder chicken'.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon chicken' as `Chernobyl Chicken'. The name is derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl).
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lasherism
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laundromat
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lasherismn.
[Harvard] A program that solves a standard problem (such as the Eight Queens puzzle or implementing thelifealgorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way. Distinguished from acrockorklugeby the fact that the programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Such constructions are quite popular in exercises such as theObfuscated C Contest, and occasionally inretrocomputing. Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became notorious for such behavior.