WhatIs

/I-S-N-X-H/

Hackers (and the interactive computer games they write) traditionally favor this slightly marked usage over other possible equivalents such as "There's no X here!" or "X is missing." or "Where's the X?". This goes back to the original PDP-10 ADVENT, which would respond in this wise if you asked it to do something involving an object not present at your location in the game.

/I-D-N-C-A/

interj. An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression test. The canonical reply to this assertion is "Then it works just the same as it did before, doesn't it?"

See also one-line fix.

/hi:'per-spays/

n. A memory location that is far away from where the program counter should be pointing, often inaccessible because it is not even mapped in.

"Another core dump -- looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow."

Compare jump off into never-never land.

/hu̇ŋ-ˈgüz/

[perhaps related to slang humongous] adj. Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable.

"TCP is a hungus piece of code."

"This is a hungus set of modifications."

/həŋ-grē pə-pē/

n. Syn. slopsucker.

/həŋ/

[from hung up]

adj. Equivalent to wedged, but more common at UNIX/C sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. with locked up, wedged; compare hosed.

See also hang.

/hyü-mər ha-kər/

n. A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor found among hackers, having the following distinctive characteristics:

1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor having to do with confusion of metalevels (see meta). One way to make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in front of him/her with "GREEN" written on it, or vice-versa (note, however, that this is funny only the first time).

/hə-mə/

excl. A filler word used on various chat and talk programs when you had nothing to say but felt that it was important to say something. The word apparently originated (at least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare System (MTS, a now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota during the 1970s and the early 1980s) but was later sighted on early UNIX systems.

/həf/

v. To compress data using a Huffman code. Various programs that use such methods have been called 'HUFF' or some variant thereof.

Oppose puff.

Compare crunch, compress.

/H-P suhks/

n. Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's UNIX port. Features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and elsewhere which occasionally create portability problems. HP-UX is often referred to as `hockey-pux' inside HP, and one respondent claims that the proper pronunciation is /H-P ukkkhhhh/ as though one were about to spit. Another such alternate spelling and pronunciation is "H-PUX" /H-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo (the former Apollo Computers which was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard to complain that Mr.