The Hacker's Dictionary, - [best reads of all time .txt] 📗

`binary'

to be paradigmatic, the most etymologically correct term for base 10, for example, is denary', which comes fromdeni' (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'. Thesexa-' prefix is Latin but incorrect in this context, and hexa-' is Greek. The wordoctal' is similarly incorrect; a correct form would be octaval' (to go with decimal), oroctonary' (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' andtrinary' 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 slangbottom 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 thelow 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' andMLL' 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 itsstructured-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 vad@ai.mit.edu (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' orhosery' (play on hosiery') oretherhose'. 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."

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