The Jargon File, Version 2.9.10, 01 Jul 1992

Chapter V: Rare: book (8)

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:happily: adv. 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."

:haque: /hak/ [USENET] n. Variant spelling of {hack}, used
only for the noun form and connoting an {elegant} hack.

:hard boot: n. See {boot}.

:hardcoded: adj. 1. Said of data inserted directly into a program,
where it cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in some
{profile}, resource (see {de-rezz} sense 2), or environment
variable that a {user} or hacker can easily modify. 2. In C,
this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a
`#define' macro (see {magic number}).

:hardwarily: /hard-weir'*-lee/ adv. In a way pertaining to
hardware. "The system is hardwarily unreliable." The adjective
`hardwary' is *not* traditionally used, though it has recently
been reported from the U.K. See {softwarily}.

:hardwired: adj. 1. In software, syn. for {hardcoded}. 2. By
extension, anything that is not modifiable, especially in the sense
of customizable to one's particular needs or tastes.

: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 the {loser} nature!" See also {the X that can be Y
is not the true X}.

:hash bucket: n. A notional receptacle into which more than one
thing accessed by the same key or short code might be dropped.
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 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' may be confused with each other.
"If you hash English words only by length, you get too many common
grammar words in the first couple of hash buckets." Compare {hash
collision}.

:hash collision: [from the technical usage] n. (var. `hash
clash') When used of people, signifies a confusion in associative
memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (see
{thinko}). 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." Compare
{hash bucket}.

:hat: n. Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (`^', ASCII
1011110) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.

: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 to
{toggle} a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in
some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn
up.

:heads down: [Sun] adj. Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so
long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also
{hack mode} and {larval stage}, although it is not confined to
fledgling hackers.

:heartbeat: n. 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 also {breath-of-life packet}.

:heatseeker: [IBM] n. A customer who can be relied upon to always
buy the latest version of an existing product (not quite the same
as a member the {lunatic fringe}). A 1992 example of a
heatseeker is someone who, owning a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, goes
out and buys 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 the bugs in each
release (n) and selling it to them as release (n+1).

:heavy metal: [Cambridge] n. Syn. {big iron}.

:heavy wizardry: n. Code or designs that trade on a particularly
intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system
or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from
{deep magic}, which trades more on arcane *theoretical*
knowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is
interfacing to {X} (sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp. found in
comments similar to "Heavy wizardry begins here ...". Compare
{voodoo programming}.

:heavyweight: adj. High-overhead; {baroque}; code-intensive;
featureful, but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols,
language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum
generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at the
expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory
utilization, and startup time. {EMACS} is a heavyweight editor;
{X} is an *extremely* heavyweight window system. This term
isn't pejorative, but one man's heavyweight is another's
{elephantine} and a third's {monstrosity}. Oppose
`lightweight'. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in
the compound `heavyweight process'.

:heisenbug: /hi:'zen-buhg/ [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle in quantum physics] n. A bug that disappears or alters
its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of
{Bohr bug}; see also {mandelbug}, {schroedinbug}. In C,
nine out of ten heisenbugs result from either {fandango on core}
phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc
{arena}) or errors that {smash the stack}.

:Helen Keller mode: n. 1. State of a hardware or software system
that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e., accepting no input and
generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other
excursion into {deep space}. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller,
whose success at learning speech was triumphant.) See also
{go flatline}, {catatonic}. 2. On IBM PCs under DOS, refers
to a specific failure mode in which a screen saver has kicked in
over an {ill-behaved} application which bypasses the interrupts
the screen saver watches for activity. Your choices are to try to
get from the program's current state through a successful
save-and-exit without being able to see what you're doing, or
re-boot the machine. This isn't (strictly speaking) a crash.

:hello, sailor!: interj. Occasional West Coast equivalent of
{hello, world}; seems to have originated at SAIL, later
associated with the game {Zork} (which also included "hello,
aviator" and "hello, implementor"). Originally from the
traditional hooker's greeting to a swabbie fresh off the boat, of
course.

:hello, wall!: excl. See {wall}.

:hello, world: interj. 1. The canonical minimal test message in the
C/UNIX universe. 2. Any of the minimal programs that emit this
message. Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to
write in a new environment is one that just prints "hello, world"
to standard output (and indeed it is the first example program
in {K&R}). Environments that generate an unreasonably large
executable for this trivial test or which require a {hairy}
compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to
{lose} (see {X}). 3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an
entrance or requesting information from anyone present. "Hello,
world! Is the {VAX} back up yet?"

:hex: n. 1. Short for {{hexadecimal}}, base 16. 2. A 6-pack
of anything (compare {quad}, sense 2). Neither usage has
anything to do with {magic} or {black art}, though the pun is
appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story: As a
joke, some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be
worn as protective amulets against hostile magic. The chips were,
of course, hex inverters.

:hexadecimal:: n. Base 16. Coined in the early 1960s to replace
earlier `sexadecimal', which was too racy and amusing for stuffy
IBM, and later adopted by the rest of the industry.

Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take `binary'
to be paradigmatic, the most etymologically correct term for
base 10, for example, is `denary', which
comes from `deni' (ten at a time, ten each), a Latin `distributive'
number; the corresponding term for base-16 would be something like
`sendenary'. `Decimal' is from an ordinal number; the
corresponding prefix for 6 would imply something like
`sextidecimal'. The `sexa-' prefix is Latin but incorrect in this
context, and `hexa-' is Greek. The word `octal' is similarly
incorrect; a correct form would be `octaval' (to go with decimal),
or `octonary' (to go with binary). If anyone ever implements a
base-3 computer, computer scientists will be faced with the
unprecedented dilemma of a choice between two *correct* forms;
both `ternary' and `trinary' have a claim to this throne.

:hexit: /hek'sit/ n. A hexadecimal digit (0--9, and A--F or a--f).
Used by people who claim that there are only *ten* digits,
dammit; sixteen-fingered human beings are rather rare, despite what
some keyboard designs might seem to imply (see {space-cadet
keyboard}).

:HHOK: See {ha ha only serious}.

:HHOS: See {ha ha only serious}.

:hidden flag: [scientific computation] n. An extra option added to a
routine without changing the calling sequence. For example,
instead of adding an explicit input variable to instruct a routine
to give extra diagnostic output, the programmer might just add a
test for some otherwise meaningless feature of the existing inputs,
such as a negative mass. Liberal use of hidden flags can make a
program very hard to debug and understand.

:high bit: [from `high-order bit'] n. 1. The most significant
bit in a byte. 2. By extension, the most significant part of
something other than a data byte: "Spare me the whole {saga},
just give me the high bit." See also {meta bit}, {hobbit},
{dread high-bit disease}, and compare the mainstream slang
`bottom line'.

:high moby: /hi:' mohb'ee/ n. The high half of a 512K
{PDP-10}'s physical address space; the other half was of course
the low moby. This usage has been generalized in a way that has
outlasted the {PDP-10}; for example, at the 1990 Washington D.C.
Area Science Fiction Conclave (Disclave), when a miscommunication
resulted in two separate wakes being held in commemoration of the
shutdown of MIT's last {{ITS}} machines, the one on the upper
floor was dubbed the `high moby' and the other the `low moby'.
All parties involved {grok}ked this instantly. See {moby}.

:highly: [scientific computation] adv. The preferred modifier for
overstating an understatement. As in: `highly nonoptimal', the
worst possible way to do something; `highly nontrivial', either
impossible or requiring a major research project; `highly
nonlinear', completely erratic and unpredictable; `highly
nontechnical', drivel written for {luser}s, oversimplified to the
point of being misleading or incorrect (compare {drool-proof
paper}). In other computing cultures, postfixing of {in the
extreme} might be preferred.

:hing: // [IRC] n. Fortuitous typo for `hint', now in wide
intentional use among players of {initgame}. Compare
{newsfroup}, {filk}.

:hirsute: adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for {hairy}.

:HLL: /H-L-L/ n. [High-Level Language (as opposed to assembler)]
Found primarily in email and news rather than speech. Rarely, the
variants `VHLL' and `MLL' are found. VHLL stands for
`Very-High-Level Language' and is used to describe a
{bondage-and-discipline language} that the speaker happens to
like; Prolog and Backus's FP are often called VHLLs. `MLL' stands
for `Medium-Level Language' and is sometimes used half-jokingly to
describe {C}, alluding to its `structured-assembler' image.
See also {languages of choice}.

:hobbit: n. 1. The High Order Bit of a byte; same as the {meta
bit} or {high bit}. 2. The non-ITS name of [email protected]
(*Hobbit*), master of lasers.

:hog: n.,vt. 1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that
seem to eat far more than their share of a system's resources,
esp. those which noticeably degrade interactive response.
*Not* used of programs that are simply extremely large or
complex or that are merely painfully slow themselves (see {pig,
run like a}). More often than not encountered in qualified forms,
e.g., `memory hog', `core hog', `hog the processor', `hog
the disk'. "A controller that never gives up the I/O bus
gets killed after the bus-hog timer expires." 2. Also said
of *people* who use more than their fair share of resources
(particularly disk, where it seems that 10% of the people use 90%
of the disk, no matter how big the disk is or how many people use
it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one filesystem, they
typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the
sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete.

:holy wars: [from {USENET}, but may predate it] n. {flame
war}s over {religious issues}. The paper by Danny Cohen that
popularized the terms {big-endian} and {little-endian} in
connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled
"On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace". Other perennial Holy
Wars have included {EMACS} vs. {vi}, my personal computer vs.
everyone else's personal computer, {{ITS}} vs. {{UNIX}},
{{UNIX}} vs. {VMS}, {BSD} UNIX vs. {USG UNIX}, {C} vs.
{{Pascal}}, {C} vs. {LISP}, etc., ad nauseam. The
characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal
technical disputes is that in a holy wars most of the participants
spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and
cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. See also
{theology}.

:home box: n. A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she
owns. "Yeah? Well, *my* home box runs a full 4.2 BSD, so
there!"

:hook: n. A software or hardware feature included in order to
simplify later additions or changes by a user. For example, a
simple program that prints numbers might always print them in base
10, but a more flexible version would let a variable determine what
base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make the program print
numbers in base 5. The variable is a simple hook. An even more
flexible program might examine the variable and treat a value of 16
or less as the base to use, but treat any other number as the
address of a user-supplied routine for printing a number. This is
a {hairy} but powerful hook; one can then write a routine to
print numbers as Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew characters, and
plug it into the program through the hook. Often the difference
between a good program and a superb one is that the latter has
useful hooks in judiciously chosen places. Both may do the
original job about equally well, but the one with the hooks is much
more flexible for future expansion of capabilities ({EMACS}, for
example, is *all* hooks). The term `user exit' is
synonymous but much more formal and less hackish.

:hop: n. One file transmission in a series required to get a file
from point A to point B on a store-and-forward network. On such
networks (including {UUCPNET} and {FidoNet}), the important
inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest path
between them, rather than their geographical separation. See
{bang path}.

:hose: 1. vt. To make non-functional or greatly degraded in
performance. "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the
system." See {hosed}. 2. n. A narrow channel through which
data flows under pressure. Generally denotes data paths that
represent performance bottlenecks. 3. n. Cabling, especially
thick Ethernet cable. This is sometimes called `bit hose' or
`hosery' (play on `hosiery') or `etherhose'. See also
{washing machine}.

:hosed: adj. Same as {down}. Used primarily by UNIX hackers.
Humorous: also implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to
reverse. Probably derived from the Canadian slang `hoser'
popularized by the Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits on SCTV. See
{hose}. It is also widely used of people in the mainstream sense
of `in an extremely unfortunate situation'.

Once upon a time, a Cray that had been experiencing periodic
difficulties crashed, and it was announced to have been hosed.
It was discovered that the crash was due to the disconnection of
some coolant hoses. The problem was corrected, and users were then
assured that everything was OK because the system had been rehosed.
See also {dehose}.

:hot spot: n. 1. [primarily used by C/UNIX programmers, but
spreading] It is received wisdom that in most programs, less than
10% of the code eats 90% of the execution time; if one were to
graph instruction visits versus code addresses, one would typically
see a few huge spikes amidst a lot of low-level noise. Such spikes
are called `hot spots' and are good candidates for heavy
optimization or {hand-hacking}. The term is especially used of
tight loops and recursions in the code's central algorithm, as
opposed to (say) initial set-up costs or large but infrequent I/O
operations. See {tune}, {bum}, {hand-hacking}. 2. The
active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put the
mouse's hot spot on the `ON' widget and click the left button."
3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse clicks, which trigger
some action. Hypertext help screens are an example, in which a hot
spot exists in the vicinity of any word for which additional
material is available. 4. In a massively parallel computer with
shared memory, the one location that all 10,000 processors are
trying to read or write at once (perhaps because they are all doing
a {busy-wait} on the same lock).

:house wizard: [prob. from ad-agency lingo, `house freak'] n. A
hacker occupying a technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position
at a commercial shop. A really effective house wizard can have
influence out of all proportion to his/her ostensible rank and
still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of UNIX wizards. The
term `house guru' is equivalent.

:HP-SUX: /H-P suhks/ n. Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX,
Hewlett-Packard's UNIX port, which eatures some truly unique bogosities
in the filesystem internals and elsewhere (these occasionally create
portability problems). HP-UX is often referred to as `hockey-pux'
inside HP, and one respondent claims that the proper pronunciation
is /H-P ukkkhhhh/ as though one were about to spit. Another such
alternate spelling and pronunciation is "H-PUX" /H-puhks/.
Hackers at HP/Apollo (the former Apollo Computers which was
swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard to complain that
Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name first, if for no
other reason than the greater eloquence of the resulting acronym.
Compare {AIDX}, {buglix}. See also {Nominal Semidestructor},
{Telerat}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools},
{terminak}.

:huff: v. To compress data using a Huffman code. Various programs
that use such methods have been called `HUFF' or some variant
thereof. Oppose {puff}. Compare {crunch}, {compress}.

:humma: // excl. A filler word used on various `chat' and
`talk' programs when you had nothing to say but felt that it was
important to say something. The word apparently originated (at
least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare System (MTS, a
now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota
during the 1970s and the early 1980s) but was later sighted on
early UNIX systems.

:Humor, Hacker:: n. A distinctive style of shared intellectual
humor found among hackers, having the following marked
characteristics:

1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor
having to do with confusion of metalevels (see {meta}). One way
to make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in front of him/her
with "GREEN" written on it, or vice-versa (note, however, that
this is funny only the first time).

2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs,
such as specifications (see {write-only memory}), standards
documents, language descriptions (see {INTERCAL}), and even
entire scientific theories (see {quantum bogodynamics},
{computron}).

3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre,
ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.

4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.

5. A fondness for apparently mindless humor with subversive
currents of intelligence in it --- for example, old Warner Brothers
and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers, the early
B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humor that combines this
trait with elements of high camp and slapstick is especially
favored.

6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas
in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See {has the X nature},
{Discordianism}, {zen}, {ha ha only serious}, {AI koans}.

See also {filk}, {retrocomputing}, and {appendix B}. If you
have an itchy feeling that all 6 of these traits are really aspects
of one thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly,
you are (a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These traits
are also recognizable (though in a less marked form) throughout
{{science-fiction fandom}}.

:hung: [from `hung up'] adj. Equivalent to {wedged}, but more
common at UNIX/C sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. with
{locked up}, {wedged}; compare {hosed}. See also {hang}.
A hung state is distinguished from {crash}ed or {down}, where the
program or system is also unusable but because it is not running
rather than because it is waiting for something. However, the
recovery from both situations is often the same.

:hungry puppy: n. Syn. {slopsucker}.

:hungus: /huhng'g*s/ [perhaps related to slang `humongous'] adj.
Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of
code." "This is a hungus set of modifications."

:hyperspace: /hi:'per-spays/ n. A memory location that is *far*
away from where the program counter should be pointing, often
inaccessible because it is not even mapped in. "Another core
dump --- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace
somehow." (Compare {jump off into never-never land}.) This
usage is from the SF notion of a spaceship jumping `into
hyperspace', that is, taking a shortcut through higher-dimensional
space --- in other words, bypassing this universe. The variant
`east hyperspace' is recorded among CMU and Bliss hackers.

= I = =====

:I didn't change anything!: interj. An aggrieved cry often heard as
bugs manifest during a regression test. The {canonical} reply to
this assertion is "Then it works just the same as it did before,
doesn't it?" See also {one-line fix}. This is also heard from
applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications
problem on an unrelated systems software change, for example a
divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added to a network.
Usually, their statement is found to be false. Upon close
questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the
program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion,
but which actually {hosed} the code completely.

:I see no X here.: Hackers (and the interactive computer games they
write) traditionally favor this slightly marked usage over other
possible equivalents such as "There's no X here!" or "X is
missing." or "Where's the X?". This goes back to the original
PDP-10 {ADVENT}, which would respond in this wise if you asked
it to do something involving an object not present at your location
in the game.

:i14y: // n. Abbrev. for `interoperability', with the `14'
replacing fourteen letters. Used in the {X} (windows)
community. Refers to portability and compatibility of data formats
(even binary ones) between different programs or implementations of
the same program on different machines.

:i18n: // n. Abbrev. for `internationali{z,s}ation', with the 18
replacing 18 letters. Used in the {X} (windows) community.

:IBM: /I-B-M/ Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually;
Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel
Movement; and a near-{infinite} number of even less complimentary
expansions, including `International Business Machines'. See
{TLA}. These abbreviations illustrate the considerable
antipathy most hackers have long felt toward the `industry leader'
(see {fear and loathing}).

What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't
so much that they are underpowered and overpriced (though that does
count against them), but that the designs are incredibly archaic,
{crufty}, and {elephantine} ... and you can't *fix* them
--- source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are
expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found
them. With the release of the UNIX-based RIOS family this may have
begun to change --- but then, we thought that when the PC-RT came
out, too.

In the spirit of universal peace and brotherhood, this lexicon now
includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM'; these derive from
some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's own
beleaguered hacker underground.

:IBM discount: n. A price increase. Outside IBM, this derives from
the common perception that IBM products are generally overpriced
(see {clone}); inside, it is said to spring from a belief that
large numbers of IBM employees living in an area cause prices to
rise.

:ICBM address: n. (Also `missile address') The form used to
register a site with the USENET mapping project includes a blank
for longitude and latitude, preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy.
This is actually used for generating geographically-correct maps of
USENET links on a plotter; however, it has become traditional to
refer to this as one's `ICBM address' or `missile address', and
many people include it in their {sig block} with that name.

:ice: [coined by USENETter Tom Maddox, popularized by William
Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels: a contrived acronym for `Intrusion
Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's novels,
software that responds to intrusion by attempting to literally kill
the intruder). Also, `icebreaker': a program designed for
cracking security on a system. Neither term is in serious use yet
as of mid-1991, but many hackers find the metaphor attractive, and
each may develop a denotation in the future.

:idempotent: [from mathematical techspeak] adj. Acting exactly
once. This term is often used with respect to {C} header files,
which contain common definitions and declarations to be included by
several source files. If a header file is ever included twice
during the same compilation (perhaps due to nested #include
files), compilation errors can result unless the header file has
protected itself against multiple inclusion; a header file so
protected is said to be idempotent. The term can also be used to
describe an initialization subroutine which is arranged to perform
some critical action exactly once, even if the routine is called
several times.

:If you want X, you know where to find it.: There is a legend that
Dennis Ritchie, inventor of {C}, once responded to demands for
features resembling those of what at the time was a much more
popular language by observing "If you want PL/1, you know where to
find it." Ever since, this has been hackish standard form for
fending off requests to alter a new design to mimic some older
(and, by implication, inferior and {baroque}) one. The case X =
{Pascal} manifests semi-regularly on USENET's comp.lang.c
newsgroup. Indeed, the case X = X has been reported in
discussions of graphics software (see {X}).

:ifdef out: /if'def owt/ v. Syn. for {condition out}, specific
to {C}.

:ill-behaved: adj. 1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or
computational method that tends to blow up because of accumulated
roundoff error or poor convergence properties. 2. Software that
bypasses the defined {OS} interfaces to do things (like screen,
keyboard, and disk I/O) itself, often in a way that depends on the
hardware of the machine it is running on or which is nonportable or
incompatible with other pieces of software. In the IBM PC/MS-DOS
world, there is a folk theorem (nearly true) to the effect that
(owing to gross inadequacies and performance penalties in the OS
interface) all interesting applications are ill-behaved. See also
{bare metal}. Oppose {well-behaved}, compare {PC-ism}. See
{mess-dos}.

:IMHO: // [from SF fandom via USENET; abbreviation for `In My Humble
Opinion'] "IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as
mistyping something in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect
errors --- and they look too Pascalish anyhow." Also seen in
variant forms such as IMNSHO (In My Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO
(In My Arrogant Opinion).

:Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!: [USENET] prov. Since USENET
first got off the ground in 1980-81, it has grown exponentially,
approximately doubling in size every year. On the other hand, most
people feel the {signal-to-noise ratio} of USENET has dropped
steadily. These trends led, as far back as mid-1983, to predictions of
the imminent collapse (or death) of the net. Ten years and
numerous doublings later, enough of these gloomy prognostications
have been confounded that the phrase "Imminent Death Of The Net
Predicted!" has become a running joke, hauled out any time someone
grumbles about the {S/N ratio} or the huge and steadily
increasing volume.

:in the extreme: adj. A preferred superlative suffix for many hackish
terms. See, for example, `obscure in the extreme' under {obscure},
and compare {highly}.

:incantation: n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that
one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used
of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used
of tricks that are so poorly documented they must be learned from a
{wizard}. "This compiler normally locates initialized data
in the data segment, but if you {mutter} the right incantation they
will be forced into text space."

:include: vt. [USENET] 1. To duplicate a portion (or whole) of
another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in a
reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response.
See the the discussion of inclusion styles under "Hacker
Writing Style". 2. [from {C}] `#include <disclaimer.h>'
has appeared in {sig block}s to refer to a notional `standard
{disclaimer} file'.

:include war: n. Excessive multi-leveled including within a
discussion {thread}, a practice that tends to annoy readers. In
a forum with high-traffic newsgroups, such as USENET, this can lead
to {flame}s and the urge to start a {kill file}.

:indent style: [C programmers] n. The rules one uses to indent code
in a readable fashion; a subject of {holy wars}. There are four
major C indent styles, described below; all have the aim of
making it easier for the reader to visually track the scope of
control constructs. The significant variable is the placement of
`{' and `}' with respect to the statement(s) they
enclose and the guard or controlling statement (`if',
`else', `for', `while', or `do') on the block,
if any.

`K&R style' --- Named after Kernighan & Ritchie, because the
examples in {K&R} are formatted this way. Also called `kernel
style' because the UNIX kernel is written in it, and the `One True
Brace Style' (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. The basic indent
shown here is eight spaces (or one tab) per level; four are
occasionally seen, but are much less common.

if (cond) {
<body>
}

`Allman style' --- Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who
wrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called
`BSD style'). Resembles normal indent style in Pascal and Algol.
Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four is just
as common (esp. in C++ code).

if (cond)
{
<body>
}

`Whitesmiths style' --- popularized by the examples that came
with Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic indent
per level shown here is eight spaces, but four is occasionally
seen.

if (cond)
{
<body>
}

`GNU style' --- Used throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software
Foundation code, and just about nowhere else. Indents are always
four spaces per level, with `{' and `}' halfway between the
outer and inner indent levels.

if (cond)
{
<body>
}

Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the most
common, with about equal mind shares. K&R/1TBS used to be nearly
universal, but is now much less common (the opening brace tends to
get lost against the right paren of the guard part in an `if'
or `while', which is a {Bad Thing}). Defenders of 1TBS
argue that any putative gain in readability is less important than
their style's relative economy with vertical space, which enables
one to see more code on one's screen at once. Doubtless these
issues will continue to be the subject of {holy wars}.

:index: n. See {coefficient of X}.

:infant mortality: n. It is common lore among hackers (and in the
electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak by
now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off
exponentially with a machine's time since power-up (that is, until
the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O
devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated
for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and
wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such
failures are often referred to as `infant mortality' problems
(or, occasionally, as `sudden infant death syndrome'). See
{bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}.

:infinite: adj. Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme.
Used very loosely as in: "This program produces infinite
garbage." "He is an infinite loser." The word most likely to
follow `infinite', though, is {hair} (it has been pointed out
that fractals are an excellent example of infinite hair). These
uses are abuses of the word's mathematical meaning. The term
`semi-infinite', denoting an immoderately large amount of some
resource, is also heard. "This compiler is taking a semi-infinite
amount of time to optimize my program." See also {semi}.

:infinite loop: n. One that never terminates (that is, the machine
{spin}s or {buzz}es forever and goes {catatonic}). There
is a standard joke that has been made about each generation's
exemplar of the ultra-fast machine: "The Cray-3 is so fast it can
execute an infinite loop in under 2 seconds!"

:infinity: n. 1. The largest value that can be represented in a
particular type of variable (register, memory location, data type,
whatever). 2. `minus infinity': The smallest such value, not
necessarily or even usually the simple negation of plus infinity.
In N-bit twos-complement arithmetic, infinity is
2^(N-1) - 1 but minus infinity is - (2^(N-1)),
not -(2^(N-1) - 1). Note also that this is different from
"time T equals minus infinity", which is closer to a
mathematician's usage of infinity.

:initgame: /in-it'gaym/ [IRC] n. An {IRC} version of the
venerable trivia game "20 questions", in which one user changes
his {nick} to the initials of a famous person or other named
entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no questions, with
the one to guess the person getting to be "it" next. As a
courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a
4-letter hint of the form sex, nationality, life-status,
reality-status. For example, MAAR means "Male, American, Alive,
Real" (as opposed to "fictional"). Initgame can be surprisingly
addictive. See also {hing}.

:insanely great: adj. [Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD UNIX
people via Bill Joy] Something so incredibly {elegant} that it is
imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of
{hacker}-natures.

:INTERCAL: /in't*r-kal/ [said by the authors to stand for
`Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym'] n. A
computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyon in 1972.
INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer
languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written language,
being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL Reference
Manual will make the style of the language clear:

It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose
work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if
one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536
in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:

DO :1 <- #0$#256

any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this
is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look
foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to
turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less
devastating for the programmer having been correct.

INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even
more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used
by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. The language
has been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently
enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity; there is even an
alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the study and ...
appreciation of the language on USENET.

:interesting: adj. In hacker parlance, this word has strong
connotations of `annoying', or `difficult', or both. Hackers
relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out
of the ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".
Oppose {trivial}, {uninteresting}.

:Internet address:: n. 1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of
the form [email protected], where foo is a user name, bar is a
{sitename}, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including
periods itself. Contrast with {bang path}; see also {network,
the} and {network address}. All Internet machines and most UUCP
sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of
behind-the-scenes magic and PD software written since 1980 or so.
See also {bang path}, {domainist}. 2. More loosely, any
network address reachable through Internet; this includes {bang
path} addresses and some internal corporate and government
networks.

Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the
four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed
by a selection of geographical domains:

com
commercial organizations
edu
educational institutions
gov
U.S. government civilian sites
mil
U.S. military sites

Note that most of the sites in the com and edu domains are in
the U.S. or Canada.

us
sites in the U.S. outside the functional domains
su
sites in the ex-Soviet Union (see {kremvax}).
uk
sites in the United Kingdom

Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty
states, each generally with a name identical to the state's postal
abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for
academic sites and a co domain for commercial ones. Other
top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways.

:interrupt: 1. [techspeak] n. On a computer, an event that
interrupts normal processing and temporarily diverts
flow-of-control through an "interrupt handler" routine. See also
{trap}. 2. interj. A request for attention from a hacker.
Often explicitly spoken. "Interrupt --- have you seen Joe
recently?" See {priority interrupt}. 3. Under MS-DOS, the
term `interrupt' is nearly synonymous with `system call', because
the OS and BIOS routines are both called using the INT instruction
(see {{interrupt list, the}}) and because programmers so often have
to bypass the OS (going directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get
reasonable performance.

:interrupt list, the:: [MS-DOS] n. The list of all known software
interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM PCs and
compatibles, maintained and made available for free redistribution
by Ralf Brown <[email protected]>. As of early 1991, it had grown to
approximately a megabyte in length.

:interrupts locked out: adj. When someone is ignoring you. In a
restaurant, after several fruitless attempts to get the waitress's
attention, a hacker might well observe "She must have interrupts
locked out". The synonym `interrupts disabled' is also common.
Variations abound; "to have one's interrupt mask bit set" and
"interrupts masked out" is also heard. See also {spl}.

:IRC: /I-R-C/ [Internet Relay Chat] n. A world-wide "party
line" network that allows one to converse with others in real
time. IRC is structured as a network of Internet servers, each of
which accepts connections from client programs, one per user. The
IRC community and the {USENET} and {MUD} communities overlap
to some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have
discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some USENET jargon
has been adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such as
{emoticon}s. There is also a vigorous native jargon,
represented in this lexicon by entries marked `[IRC]'. See also
{talk mode}.

:iron: n. Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of
{mainframe} class with big metal cabinets housing relatively
low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern
supercomputers). Often in the phrase {big iron}. Oppose
{silicon}. See also {dinosaur}.

:Iron Age: n. In the history of computing, 1961--1971 --- the
formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when {big
iron} {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. These began with the delivery
of the first PDP-1, coincided with the dominance of ferrite
{core}, and ended with the introduction of the first commercial
microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also {Stone Age};
compare {elder days}.

:iron box: [UNIX/Internet] n. A special environment set up to trap
a {cracker} logging in over remote connections long enough to be
traced. May include a modified {shell} restricting the cracker's
movements in unobvious ways, and `bait' files designed to keep
him interested and logged on. See also {back door},
{firewall machine}, {Venus flytrap}, and Clifford Stoll's
account in `{The Cuckoo's Egg}' of how he made and used
one (see the Bibliography in appendix C). Compare {padded
cell}.

:ironmonger: [IBM] n. Derogatory. A hardware specialist. Compare
{sandbender}, {polygon pusher}.

:ITS:: /I-T-S/ n. 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an
influential but highly idiosyncratic operating system written for
PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab. Much
AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been `an
ITS hacker' qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the most
venerable sort. ITS pioneered many important innovations,
including transparent file sharing between machines and
terminal-independent I/O. After about 1982, most actual work was
shifted to newer machines, with the remaining ITS boxes run
essentially as a hobby and service to the hacker community. The
shutdown of the lab's last ITS machine in May 1990 marked the end
of an era and sent old-time hackers into mourning nationwide (see
{high moby}). The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden is
maintaining one `live' ITS site at its computer museum (right next
to the only TOPS-10 system still on the Internet), so ITS is still
alleged to hold the record for OS in longest continuous use
(however, {{WAITS}} is a credible rival for this palm). See
{appendix A}. 2. A mythical image of operating-system perfection
worshiped by a bizarre, fervent retro-cult of old-time hackers and
ex-users (see {troglodyte}, sense 2). ITS worshipers manage
somehow to continue believing that an OS maintained by
assembly-language hand-hacking that supported only monocase
6-character filenames in one directory per account remains superior
to today's state of commercial art (their venom against UNIX is
particularly intense). See also {holy wars},
{Weenix}.

:IWBNI: // [abbreviation] `It Would Be Nice If'. Compare {WIBNI}.

:IYFEG: // [USENET] Abbreviation for `Insert Your Favorite Ethnic
Group'. Used as a meta-name when telling racist jokes on the net
to avoid offending anyone. See {JEDR}.

= J = =====

:J. Random: /J rand'm/ n. [generalized from {J. Random Hacker}]
Arbitrary; ordinary; any one; any old. `J. Random' is often
prefixed to a noun to make a name out of it. It means roughly
`some particular' or `any specific one'. "Would you let
J. Random Loser marry your daughter?" The most common uses are
`J. Random Hacker', `J. Random Loser', and `J. Random Nerd'
("Should J. Random Loser be allowed to {gun} down other
people?"), but it can be used simply as an elaborate version of
{random} in any sense.

:J. Random Hacker: [MIT] /J rand'm hak'r/ n. A mythical figure
like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. See
{random}, {Suzie COBOL}. This may originally have been
inspired by `J. Fred Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee whose name was a
household word back in the early days of {TMRC}, and was
probably influenced by `J. Presper Eckert' (one of the co-inventors
of the digital computer).

:jack in: v. To log on to a machine or connect to a network or
{BBS}, esp. for purposes of entering a {virtual reality}
simulation such as a {MUD} or {IRC} (leaving is "jacking
out"). This term derives from {cyberpunk} SF, in which it was
used for the act of plugging an electrode set into neural sockets
in order to interface the brain directly to a virtual reality.
It's primarily used by MUD & IRC fans and younger hackers on BBS
systems.

:jaggies: /jag'eez/ n. The `stairstep' effect observable when an
edge (esp. a linear edge of very shallow or steep slope) is
rendered on a pixel device (as opposed to a vector display).

:JCL: /J-C-L/ n. 1. IBM's supremely {rude} Job Control
Language. JCL is the script language used to control the execution
of programs in IBM's batch systems. JCL has a very {fascist}
syntax, and some versions will, for example, {barf} if two
spaces appear where it expects one. Most programmers confronted
with JCL simply copy a working file (or card deck), changing the
file names. Someone who actually understands and generates unique
JCL is regarded with the mixed respect one gives to someone who
memorizes the phone book. It is reported that hackers at IBM
itself sometimes sing "Who's the breeder of the crud that mangles
you and me? I-B-M, J-C-L, M-o-u-s-e" to the tune of the
"Mickey Mouse Club" theme to express their opinion of the
beast. 2. A comparative for any very {rude} software that a
hacker is expected to use. "That's as bad as JCL." As with
{COBOL}, JCL is often used as an archetype of ugliness even by
those who haven't experienced it. See also {IBM}, {fear and
loathing}.

:JEDR: // n. Synonymous with {IYFEG}. At one time, people in
the USENET newsgroup rec.humor.funny tended to use `JEDR'
instead of {IYFEG} or `<ethnic>'; this stemmed from a public
attempt to suppress the group once made by a loser with initials
JEDR after he was offended by an ethnic joke posted there. (The
practice was {retcon}ned by the expanding these initials as
`Joke Ethnic/Denomination/Race'.) After much sound and fury JEDR
faded away; this term appears to be doing likewise. JEDR's only
permanent effect on the net.culture was to discredit
`sensitivity' arguments for censorship so thoroughly that more
recent attempts to raise them have met with immediate and
near-universal rejection.

:JFCL: /jif'kl/, /jaf'kl/, /j*-fi'kl/ vt., obs. (alt.
`jfcl') To cancel or annul something. "Why don't you jfcl that
out?" The fastest do-nothing instruction on older models of the
PDP-10 happened to be JFCL, which stands for "Jump if Flag set and
then CLear the flag"; this does something useful, but is a very
fast no-operation if no flag is specified. Geoff Goodfellow, one
of the jargon-1 co-authors, had JFCL on the license plate of his
BMW for years. Usage: rare except among old-time PDP-10
hackers.

:jiffy: n. 1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on the
computer (see {tick}). Often one AC cycle time (1/60 second in
the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently
1/100 sec has become common. "The swapper runs every 6 jiffies"
means that the virtual memory management routine is executed once
for every 6 ticks of the clock, or about ten times a second.
2. Confusingly, the term is sometimes also used for a 1-millisecond
{wall time} interval. Even more confusingly, physicists
semi-jokingly use `jiffy' to mean the time required for light to
travel one foot in a vacuum, which turns out to be close to one
*nanosecond*. 3. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to
forever. "I'll do it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and
possibly never. This is a bit contrary to the more widespread use
of the word. Oppose {nano}. See also {Real Soon Now}.

:job security: n. When some piece of code is written in a
particularly {obscure} fashion, and no good reason (such as time
or space optimization) can be discovered, it is often said that the
programmer was attempting to increase his job security (i.e., by
making himself indispensable for maintenance). This sour joke
seldom has to be said in full; if two hackers are looking over some
code together and one points at a section and says "job security",
the other one may just nod.

:jock: n. 1. A programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat
brute-force programs. See {brute force}. 2. When modified by
another noun, describes a specialist in some particular computing
area. The compounds `compiler jock' and `systems jock' seem to be
the best-established examples of this.

:joe code: /joh' kohd`/ n. 1. Code that is overly {tense} and
unmaintainable. "{Perl} may be a handy program, but if you look
at the source, it's complete joe code." 2. Badly written,
possibly buggy code.

Correspondents wishing to remain anonymous have fingered a
particular Joe at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed
that usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet `Joe code'
was intended in sense 1.

:jolix: n. /johl'liks/ n.,adj. 386BSD, the freeware port of the
BSD Net/2 release to the Intel i386 architecture by Bill Jolitz and
friends. Used to differentiate from BSDI's port based on the same
source tape, which is called BSD/386. See {BSD}.

:JR[LN]: /J-R-L/, /J-R-N/ n. The names JRL and JRN were
sometimes used as example names when discussing a kind of user ID
used under {{TOPS-10}} and {WAITS}; they were understood to be
the initials of (fictitious) programmers named `J. Random Loser'
and `J. Random Nerd' (see {J. Random}). For example, if one
said "To log in, type log one comma jay are en" (that is,
"log 1,JRN"), the listener would have understood that he should
use his own computer ID in place of `JRN'.

:JRST: /jerst/ [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] v.,obs. To
suddenly change subjects, with no intention of returning to the
previous topic. Usage: rather rare except among PDP-10 diehards,
and considered silly. See also {AOS}.

:juggling eggs: vi. Keeping a lot of {state} in your head while
modifying a program. "Don't bother me now, I'm juggling eggs",
means that an interrupt is likely to result in the program's being
scrambled. In the classic first-contact SF novel `The Mote in
God's Eye', by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes
a very difficult task by saying "We juggle priceless eggs in
variable gravity." That is a very hackish use of language. See
also {hack mode}.

:jump off into never-never land: [from J. M. Barrie's `Peter
Pan'] v. Same as {branch to Fishkill}, but more common in
technical cultures associated with non-IBM computers that use the
term `jump' rather than `branch'. Compare {hyperspace}.

:jupiter: [IRC] vt. To kill an {IRC} {robot} or user, and
then take its place by adopting its {nick} so that it cannot
reconnect. Named after a particular IRC user who did this to
NickServ, the robot in charge of preventing people from
inadvertently using a nick claimed by another user.

= K = =====

:K: /K/ [from {kilo-}] n. A kilobyte. This is used both as a
spoken word and a written suffix (like {meg} and {gig} for
megabyte and gigabyte). See {{quantifiers}}.

:K&R: [Kernighan and Ritchie] n. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's
book `The C Programming Language', esp. the classic and influential
first edition (Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-113-110163-3). Syn.
{White Book}, {Old Testament}. See also {New Testament}.

:K-line: [IRC] v. To ban a particular person from an {IRC}
server, usually for grossly bad {netiquette}. Comes from the
`K' code used to accomplish this in IRC's configuration file.

:kahuna: /k*-hoo'nuh/ [IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] n.
Synonym for {wizard}, {guru}.

:kamikaze packet: n. The `official' jargon for what is more commonly
called a {Christmas tree packet}. RFC-1025, `TCP and IP Bake Off'
says:

10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze"
packet (AKA nastygram, christmas tree packet, lamp test
segment, et al.). That is, correctly handle a segment with the
maximum combination of features at once (e.g., a SYN URG PUSH
FIN segment with options and data).

Comments

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