WhatIs

/trü-ha-kər/

[analogy with 'trufan' from SF fandom]

n. One who exemplifies the primary values of hacker culture, esp. competence and helpfulness to other hackers. A high compliment.

"He spent 6 hours helping me bring up UUCP and netnews on my FOOBAR 4000 last week -- manifestly the act of a true-hacker."

Compare demigod, oppose munchkin.

/trō-jən hȯrs/

[coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards]

n. A program designed to break security or damage a system that is disguised as something else benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, a game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses!

See back door, virus, worm.

/trä-glə-dīt mōd/

[Rice University]

n. Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you've been up for so many days straight that your eyes hurt (see raster burn). Loud music blaring from a stereo stacked in the corner is optional but recommended.

See larval stage, hack mode.

/trä-glə-dīt/

[Commodore]

n. 1. A hacker who never leaves his cubicle. The term 'Gnoll' (from Dungeons & Dragons) is also reported.

2. A curmudgeon attached to an obsolescent computing environment. The combination 'ITS troglodyte' was flung around some during the USENET and email wringle-wrangle attending the 2.x.x revision of the Jargon File; at least one of the people it was intended to describe adopted it with pride.

/tri-vē-əl/

adj. 1. Too simple to bother detailing.

2. Not worth the speaker's time.

3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly cretinous would have thought of them already.

4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish 'trivial' usually evaluates to 'I've seen it before'). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers.

See nontrivial, uninteresting.

/trit/

[by analogy with bit]

n. One base-3 digit; the amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three equally likely outcomes (see also bit). These arise, for example, in the context of a flag that should actually be able to assume three values -- such as yes, no, or unknown. 

/R-T-I/

interj. The mnemonic for the return from interrupt instruction on many computers including the 6502 and 6800. The variant RETI is found among former Z80 hackers (almost nobody programs these things in assembler anymore). 

Equivalent to "Now, where was I?" or used to end a conversational digression.

See pop; see also POPJ.

/trē-ki-lər/

[Sun]

n. 1. A printer.

2. A person who wastes paper. This should be interpreted in a broad sense; wasting paper includes the production of spiffy but content-free documents. Thus, most suits are tree-killers.

/trash/

vt. To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including mung, mangle, and scribble.

/trap dȯr/

alt. trapdoor n. 1. Syn. back door.

2. [techspeak] A trap-door function is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions have important applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key cryptosystems.