The New Hacker's Dictionary

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hamster n.

1. [Fairchild] A particularly slick little piece of code that does one thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a hamster [6611]happily spinning 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 //

[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Have A Nice Day. Typically used to close a [6615]Usenet posting, but also used to informally close emails; often preceded by [6616]HTH.

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hand cruft vt.

[pun on `hand craft'] See [6620]cruft, sense 3.

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Node:hand-hacking, Next:[6621]hand-roll, Previous:[6622]hand cruft, Up:[6623]= H =

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hand-hacking n.

1. [rare] The practice of translating [6624]hot spots from an [6625]HLL into hand-tuned assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. See [6626]tune, [6627]bum, [6628]by hand; syn. with v. [6629]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 v.

[from obs. mainstream slang `hand-rolled' in opposition to `ready-made', referring to cigarettes] To perform a normally automated software installation or configuration process [6633]by 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 n.

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

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[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 is [6655]bogus. 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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Node:hang, Next:[6656]Hanlon's Razor, Previous:[6657]handwave,

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hang v.

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". See [6659]wedged, [6660]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." Compare [6661]block. 3. To attach a peripheral device, esp. in the construction `hang off': "We're going to hang another

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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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Node:Hanlon's Razor, Next:[6662]happily, Previous:[6663]hang,

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Hanlon's Razor prov.

A corollary of [6665]Finagle'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 in [6666]sig blocks, [6667]fortune cookie files 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. Compare [6668]Sturgeon's Law, [6669]Ninety-Ninety Rule.

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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

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[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 [6701]loser nature!" See also [6702]the X that can be Y is not the true X. See also [6703]mu.

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hash bucket n.

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." Compare [6707]hash collision.

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Node:hash collision, Next:[6708]hat, Previous:[6709]hash bucket, Up:[6710]= H =

hash collision n.

[from the techspeak] (var. `hash clash') When used of people, signifies a confusion in associative memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (see [6711]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