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hamstern.
1. [Fairchild] A particularly slick little piece of code that does one thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a hamsterhappilyspinning its exercise wheel. 2. A tailless mouse; that is, one with an infrared link to a receiver on the machine, as opposed to the conventional cable. 3. [UK] Any item of hardware made by Amstrad, a company famous for its cheap plastic PC-almost-compatibles.
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HAND
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hand cruft
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hamster
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HAND//
[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Have A Nice Day. Typically used to close aUsenetposting, but also used to informally close emails; often preceded byHTH.
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hand cruft
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hand-hacking
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HAND
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hand cruftvt.
[pun on `hand craft'] Seecruft, sense 3.
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hand-hacking
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hand-roll
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hand cruft
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hand-hackingn.
1. [rare] The practice of translatinghot spots from anHLLinto hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. Seetune,bum,by hand; syn. with v.cruft. 2. [common] More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans.
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hand-roll
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handle
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hand-hacking
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hand-rollv.
[from obs. mainstream slang `hand-rolled' in opposition to `ready-made', referring to cigarettes] To perform a normally automated software installation or configuration processby hand; implies that the normal process failed due to bugs in the configurator or was defeated by something exceptional in the local environment. "The worst thing about being a gateway between four different nets is having to hand-roll a new sendmail configuration every time any of them upgrades."
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handle
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handshaking
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hand-roll
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handlen.
1. [from CB slang] An electronic pseudonym; a `nom de guerre' intended to conceal the user's true identity. Network and BBS handles function as the same sort of simultaneous concealment and display one finds on Citizen's Band radio, from which the term was adopted. Use of grandiose handles is characteristic ofwarez d00dz,crackers,weenies,spods, and other lower forms of network life; true hackers travel on their own reputations rather than invented legendry. Comparenick,screen name. 2. Amagic cookie, often in the form of a numeric index into some array somewhere, through which you can manipulate an object like a file or window. The form `file handle' is especially common. 3. [Mac] A pointer to a pointer to dynamically-allocated memory; the extra level of indirection allows on-the-fly memory compaction (to cut down on fragmentation) or aging out of unused resources, with minimal impact on the (possibly multiple) parts of the larger program containing references to the allocated memory. Comparesnap(to snap a handle would defeat its purpose); see alsoaliasing bug,dangling pointer.
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handshaking
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handwave
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handle
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handshakingn.
[very common] Hardware or software activity designed to start or keep two machines or programs in synchronization as theydo protocol. Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker might watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to indicate that they have heard each others' points and say "Oh, they're handshaking!". See alsoprotocol.
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handwave
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hang
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handshaking
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handwave
[poss. from gestures characteristic of stage magicians] 1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic. 2. n. The act of handwaving. "Boy, what a handwave!"
If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It is self-evident that...", it is a good bet he is about to handwave (alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a paraphrase of someone else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). The theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right moment, the listener may be sufficiently distracted to not notice that what you have said isbogus. Failing that, if a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the objection with a wave of your hand.
The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the handwave); alternatively, holding the forearms in one position while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an outrageously unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words could express, that his logic is faulty.
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hang
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Hanlon's Razor
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handwave
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hangv.
1. [very common] To wait for an event that will never occur. "The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed drive". Seewedged,hung. 2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something happens. "The program displays a menu and then hangs until you type a character." Compareblock. 3. To attach a peripheral device, esp. in the construction `hang off': "We're going to hang another tape drive off the file server." Implies a device attached with cables, rather than something that is strictly inside the machine's chassis.
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Hanlon's Razor
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happily
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hang
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Hanlon's Razorprov.
A corollary ofFinagle's Law, similar to Occam's Razor, that reads "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The derivation of the Hanlon eponym is not definitely known, but a very similar remark ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.") appears in "Logic of Empire", a classic 1941 SF story by Robert A. Heinlein, who calls it the `devil theory' of sociology. Heinlein's popularity in the hacker culture makes plausible the supposition that `Hanlon' is derived from `Heinlein' by phonetic corruption. A similar epigram has been attributed to William James, but Heinlein more probably got the idea from Alfred Korzybski and other practitioners of General Semantics. Quoted here because it seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often showing up insig blocks,fortune cookiefiles and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks. This probably reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments created by well-intentioned but short-sighted people. CompareSturgeon's Law,Ninety-Ninety Rule.
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happily
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happilyadv.
Of software, used to emphasize that a program is unaware of some important fact about its environment, either because it has been fooled into believing a lie, or because it doesn't care. The sense of `happy' here is not that of elation, but rather that of blissful ignorance. "The program continues to run, happily unaware that its output is going to /dev/null." Also used to suggest that a program or device would really rather be doing something destructive, and is being given an opportunity to do so. "If you enter an O here instead of a zero, the program will happily erase all your data." Neverheless, use of this term implies a basically benign attitude towards the program: It didn't mean any harm, it was just eager to do its job. We'd like to be angry at it but we shouldn't, we should try to understand it instead. The adjective "cheerfully" is often used in exactly the same way.
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haque
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haque/hak/ n.
[Usenet] Variant spelling ofhack, used only for the noun form and connoting aneleganthack. that is ahackin sense 2.
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hard boot
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hardcoded
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haque
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hard bootn.
Seeboot.
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hardcoded
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hardwarily
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hard boot
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hardcodedadj.
1. [common] Said of data inserted directly into a program, where it cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in someprofile, resource (seede-rezzsense 2), or environment variable that auseror hacker can easily modify. 2. In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a#definemacro (seemagic number).
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hardwarily
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hardwired
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hardwarily/hard-weir'*-lee/ adv.
In a way pertaining to hardware. "The system is hardwarily unreliable." The adjective `hardwary' isnottraditionally used, though it has recently been reported from the U.K. Seesoftwarily.
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hardwired
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hardwarily
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hardwiredadj.
1. In software, syn. forhardcoded. 2. By extension, anything that is not modifiable, especially in the sense of customizable to one's particular needs or tastes.
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has the X nature
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hash bucket
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has the X nature
[seems to derive from Zen Buddhist koans of the form "Does an X have the Buddha-nature?"] adj. Common hacker construction for `is an X', used for humorous emphasis. "Anyone who can't even use a program with on-screen help embedded in it truly has thelosernature!" See alsothe X that can be Y is not the true X. See alsomu.
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hash bucket
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hash collision
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hash bucketn.
A notional receptacle, a set of which might be used to apportion data items for sorting or lookup purposes. When you look up a name in the phone book (for example), you typically hash it by extracting its first letter; the hash buckets are the alphabetically ordered letter sections. This term is used as techspeak with respect to code that uses actual hash functions; in jargon, it is used for human associative memory as well. Thus, two things `in the same hash bucket' are more difficult to discriminate, and may be confused. "If you hash English words only by length, you get too many common grammar words in the first couple of hash buckets." Comparehash collision.
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hash collision
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hash collisionn.
[from the techspeak] (var. `hash clash') When used of people, signifies a confusion in associative memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (seethinko). True story: One of us [ESR] was once on the phone with a friend about to move out to Berkeley. When asked what he expected Berkeley to be like, the friend replied: "Well, I have this mental picture of naked women throwing Molotov cocktails, but I think that's just a collision in my hash tables." Comparehash bucket.
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hat
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HCF
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hatn.
Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (`^', ASCII 1011110) character. SeeASCIIfor other synonyms.
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HCF
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hat
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HCF/H-C-F/ n.
Mnemonic for `Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor totogglea subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up. Comparekiller poke.
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heads down
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heartbeat
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HCF
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heads down[Sun] adj.
Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See alsohack modeandlarval stage, although this mode is hardly confined to fledgling hackers.
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heartbeat
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heatseeker
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heartbeatn.
1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end of every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is still connected. 2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware, such as a bus clock or a periodic interrupt. 3. The `natural' oscillation frequency of a computer's clock crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's clock rate. 4. A signal emitted at regular intervals by software to demonstrate that it is still alive. Sometimes hardware is designed to reboot the machine if it stops hearing a heartbeat. See alsobreath-of-life packet.
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heatseeker
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heavy metal
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heartbeat
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heatseekern.
[IBM] A customer who can be relied upon to buy, without fail, the latest version of an existing product (not quite the same as a member of thelunatic fringe). A 1993 example of a heatseeker was someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, went out and bought Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers were heatseekers, vast amounts of money could be made by just fixing some of the bugs in each release (n) and selling it to them as release (n+1). Microsoft in fact seems to have mastered this technique.
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heavy metal
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heavy wizardry
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heatseeker
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heavy metaln.
[Cambridge] Syn.big iron.
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heavy wizardry
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heavyweight
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heavy metal
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heavy wizardryn.
Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished fromdeep magic, which trades more on arcanetheoreticalknowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing toX(sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp. found in source-code comments of the form "Heavy wizardry begins here". Comparevoodoo programming.
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heavyweight
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heisenbug
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heavy wizardry