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

is reported that some Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish lemon chicken' asChernobyl 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).

:Lasherism: [Harvard] n. A program which solves a standard problem (such as the Eight Queens puzzle or implementing the {life}

algorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way. Distinguished from a {crock} or {kluge} by the fact that the programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became notorious for such behavior.

:laundromat: n. Syn. {disk farm}; see {washing machine}.

:LDB: /l'db/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt. To extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same name.

Considered silly. See also {DPB}.

:leaf site: n. A machine that merely originates and reads USENET

news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic. Often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the network tends to develop bottlenecks. Compare {backbone site}, {rib site}.

:leak: n. With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out).

This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in. {memory leak} and {fd leak} have their own entries; one might also refer, to, say, a `window handle leak' in a window system.

:leaky heap: [Cambridge] n. An {arena} with a {memory leak}.

:legal: adj. Loosely used to mean in accordance with all the relevant rules', esp. in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket ofnatural laws' to achieve a desired objective. Their use of `legal' is flavored as much by this game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers.

Compare {language lawyer}, {legalese}.

:legalese: n. Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a {language lawyer} to {parse} it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, {suit}s, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.

:LER: /L-E-R/ [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] n. A light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's law was broken. See {SED}.

:LERP: /lerp/ vi.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for the operation. E.g., Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the two endpoints of the line.

:let the smoke out: v. To fry hardware (see {fried}). See {magic smoke} for the mythology behind this.

:letterbomb: n. A piece of {email} containing {live data}

intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or terminal. It is possible, for example, to send letterbombs that will lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see {cycle}, sense 3) to unwedge them. Under UNIX, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer.

The results of this could range from silly to tragic. See also {Trojan horse}; compare {nastygram}.

:lexer: /lek'sr/ n. Common hacker shorthand for lexical analyzer', the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language (the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). "Some C lexers get confused by the old-style compound ops like=-'."

:lexiphage: /lek'si-fayj`/ n. A notorious word {chomper} on ITS. See {bagbiter}.

:life: n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (Scientific American', October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in {TECO}!; see {Gosperism}). When a hacker mentionslife', he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence.

The opposite of {USENET}. As in {Get a life!}

:Life is hard: [XEROX PARC] prov. This phrase has two possible interpretations: (1) "While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I hadn't heard it." (2) "While your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious circumstances prevent it from being seriously considered." The charm of the phrase lies precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity.

:light pipe: n. Fiber optic cable. Oppose {copper}.

:lightweight: adj. Opposite of {heavyweight}; usually found in combining forms such as `lightweight process'.

:like kicking dead whales down the beach: adj. Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. "Well, you could write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach."

See also {fear and loathing}

:like nailing jelly to a tree: adj. Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain.

"Trying to display the prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure whatprettiest' means algorithmically."

:line 666: [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notational line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons, implying either that somebody is out to get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not). "It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast.

Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size."

:line eater, the: [USENET] n. 1. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ

bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the line eater', and postings often included a dummy line ofline eater food'. Ironically, line eater food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there *was* a space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food *and* the beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice ofsacrificing to the line eater'

continued for some time after the bug had been {nailed to the wall}, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself is still (in mid-1991) occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways. 2. See {NSA line eater}.

:line noise: n. 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232

serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms, {cosmic rays}, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like the results of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes, there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is {TECO}; it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable from line noise." Other non-{WYSIWYG} editors, such as Multics qed' and Unixed', in the hands of a real hacker, also qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as {INTERCAL}.

:line starve: [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen.

"To print X squared', you just outputX', line starve, 2', line feed." (The line starve causes the2' to appear on the line above the X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Unlikeline feed', `line starve' is not standard {{ASCII}}

terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly.

[proposed] A sequence such as c (used in System V echo, as well as nroff/troff) that suppresses a {newline} or other character(s) that would normally be emitted.

:link farm: [UNIX] n. A directory tree that contains many links to files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms save space when (for example) one is maintaining