The New Hacker's Dictionary

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Node:home machine, Next:[6893]home page, Previous:[6894]home box, Up:[6895]= H =

home machine n.

1. Syn. [6896]home box. 2. The machine that receives your email. These senses might be distinct, for example, for a hacker who owns one computer at home, but reads email at work.

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Node:home page, Next:[6897]honey pot, Previous:[6898]home machine, Up:[6899]= H =

home page n.

1. One's personal billboard on the World Wide Web. The term `home page' is perhaps a bit misleading because home directories and physical homes in [6900]RL are private, but home pages are designed to be very public. 2. By extension, a WWW repository for information and links related to a project or organization. Compare [6901]home box.

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Node:honey pot, Next:[6902]hook, Previous:[6903]home page, Up:[6904]= H =

honey pot n.

A box designed to attract [6905]crackers so that they can be observed in action. It is usually well isolated from the rest of the network, but has extensive logging (usually network layer, on a different machine). Different from an [6906]iron box in that it's purpose is to attract, not merely observe. Sometimes, it is also a defensive network security tactic - you set up an easy-to-crack box so that your real servers don't get messed with. The concept was presented in Cheswick & Bellovin's book "Firewalls and

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Internet Security".

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Node:hook, Next:[6907]hop, Previous:[6908]honey pot, Up:[6909]= H =

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 [6910]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 ([6911]EMACS, for example, is all hooks). The term `user exit' is synonymous but much more formal and less hackish.

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Node:hop, Next:[6912]hose, Previous:[6913]hook, Up:[6914]= H =

hop

1. n. [common] 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 [6915]UUCPNET and [6916]FidoNet), an important inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest path between them, which can be more significant than their geographical separation. See

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[6917]bang path. 2. v. [rare] To log in to a remote machine, esp. via rlogin or telnet. "I'll hop over to foovax to FTP that."

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Node:hose, Next:[6918]hosed, Previous:[6919]hop, Up:[6920]= H =

hose

1. vt. [common] To make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance. "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the system." See [6921]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 [6922]washing machine.

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Node:hosed, Next:[6923]hot chat, Previous:[6924]hose, Up:[6925]= H =

hosed adj.

Same as [6926]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, but this usage predated SCTV by years in hackerdom (it was certainly already live at CMU in the 1970s). See [6927]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 [6928]dehose.

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Node:hot chat, Next:[6929]hot spot, Previous:[6930]hosed, Up:[6931]= H

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hot chat n.

Sexually explicit one-on-one chat. See [6932]teledildonics.

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Node:hot spot, Next:[6933]hotlink, Previous:[6934]hot chat, Up:[6935]= H

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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 [6936]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 [6937]tune, [6938]bum, [6939]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 gestures, which trigger some action. World Wide Web pages now provide the [6940]canonical examples; WWW browsers present hypertext links as hot spots which, when clicked on, point the browser at another document (these are specifically called [6941]hotlinks). 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 [6942]busy-wait on the same lock). 5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns into a performance bottleneck due to resource contention.

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Node:hotlink, Next:[6943]house wizard, Previous:[6944]hot spot, Up:[6945]= H =

hotlink /hot'link/ n.

A [6946]hot spot on a World Wide Web page; an area, which, when clicked or selected, chases a URL. Also spelled `hot link'. Use of this term focuses on the link's role as an immediate part of your display, as opposed to the timeless sense of logical connection suggested by [6947]web pointer. Your screen shows hotlinks but your document has web pointers, not (in normal usage) the other way around.

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Node:house wizard, Next:[6948]HP-SUX, Previous:[6949]hotlink, Up:[6950]= H =

house wizard n.

[prob. from ad-agency tradetalk, `house freak'] 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.

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Node:HP-SUX, Next:[6951]HTH, Previous:[6952]house wizard, Up:[6953]= H =

HP-SUX /H-P suhks/ n.

Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's Unix port, which features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and

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Node:hungus, Next:[6991]hyperspace, Previous:[6992]hungry puppy, Up:[6993]= H =

hungus /huhng'g*s/ adj.

[perhaps related to slang `humongous'] Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set of modifications." The [6994]Infocom text adventure game "Beyond Zork" included two monsters called hunguses.

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Node:hyperspace, Next:[6995]hysterical reasons, Previous:[6996]hungus, Up:[6997]= H =

hyperspace /hi:'per-spays/ n.

A memory location that is far away from where the program counter should be pointing, especially a place that is inaccessible because it is not even mapped in by the virtual-memory system. "Another core dump -- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow." (Compare [6998]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.

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Node:hysterical reasons, Next:[6999]I didn't change anything!, Previous:[7000]hyperspace, Up:[7001]= H =

hysterical reasons n.

(also `hysterical raisins') A variant on the stock phrase "for historical reasons", indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way for backwards compatibility, and moreover that the feature it