WhatIs

/ˈhat/

n. Common (spoken) name for the circumflex ('^', ASCII 1011110) character.

See ASCII for other synonyms.

/hash kə-ˈli-zhən/

[from the technical usage]

n. (var. 'hash clash') When used of people, signifies a confusion in associative memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (see 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 naked women throwing Molotov cocktails, but I think that's just a collision in my hash tables."

/hash bə-kət/

n. A notional receptacle into which more than one thing accessed by the same key or short code might be dropped. 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 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' may be confused with each other.

/has t͟hə eks nā-chər/

[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 loser nature!"

See also the X that can be Y is not the true X.

/härd-wī(-ə)rd/

adj. 

1. In software, syn. for HardCoded.

2. By extension, anything that is not modifiable, especially in the sense of customizable to one's particular needs or tastes.

/härd-weir'*-lee/

adv. In a way pertaining to hardware.

"The system is hardwarily unreliable."

The adjective hardwary is *not* traditionally used, though it has recently been reported from the U.K.

See softwarily.

/härd kōd'd/

adj. 1. Said of data inserted directly into a program, where it cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in some profile, resource (see de-rezz sense 2), or environment variable that a user or hacker can easily modify.

2. In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a '#define' macro (see magic number).

/härd büt/

n. See boot.

/ha-pə-lē/

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 believing a lie, or because it doesn't care. The sense of 'happy' here is not that of elation, but rather that of blissful ignorance.

"The program continues to run, happily unaware that its output is going to /dev/null."

/ˈhan-lᵊns rā-zər/

prov. A corollary of Finagle's Law, similar to Occam's Razor, that reads

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."