WhatIs

/haŋ/

v. 1. To wait for an event that will never occur.
"The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed drive".
See wedged, 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 block.

/hand-ˌwā-v/

[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!"

/handshākiŋ/

n. Hardware or software activity designed to start or keep two machines or programs in synchronization as they do protocol. Often applied to human activity; thus, a hacker might watch two people in conversation nodding their heads to indicate that they have heard each others' points and say "Oh, they're handshaking!".

See also protocol.

/hand-hakiŋ/

n. 1. The practice of translating hot spots from an 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 tune, bum, by hand; syn. with v. cruft.

/ham(p)-stər/

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 happily spinning its exercise wheel.

2. [UK] Any item of hardware made by Amstrad, a company famous for its cheap plastic PC-almost-compatibles.

/hak'speek/

n. A shorthand method of spelling found on many British academic bulletin boards and talker systems. Syllables and whole words in a sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters the names of which are phonetically similar or equivalent, while multiple letters are usually dropped. Hence, 'for' becomes '4'; 'two', 'too', and 'to' become '2'; 'ck' becomes 'k'.

"Before I see you tomorrow" becomes "b4 i c u 2moro".

/hak'mem/

n. MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972). A legendary collection of neat mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and elsewhere. (The title of the memo really is "HAKMEM", which is a 6-letterism for 'hacks memo'.) Some of them are very useful techniques, powerful theorems, or interesting unsolved problems, but most fall into the category of mathematical and computer trivia. Here is a sampling of the entries (with authors), slightly paraphrased:

Item 41 (Gene Salamin): There are exactly 23,000 prime numbers less than 218.

/ˈher-ē/

1. Annoyingly complicated.
"DWIM is incredibly hairy."

2. Incomprehensible.
"DWIM is incredibly hairy."

3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about."
See also hirsute.

/ˈher/

[back-formation from hairy]

n. The complications that make something hairy.

"Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of hair."

Often seen in the phrase 'infinite hair', which connotes extreme complexity. Also in 'hairiferous' (tending to promote hair growth):

"GNUMACS Elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes."

"Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right." (or just: "Hair squared!")

/hak-ə-tüd/

n. Syn. hackishness; this word is considered sillier.