WhatIs

/bau̇n(t)s/

v. 1. [perhaps from the image of a thrown ball bouncing off a wall] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to 'bounce'.

See also bounce message.

/bä-təm-ˈəp im-plə-mən-ˈtā-shən/

n. Hackish opposite of the techspeak term 'top-down design'. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to *build* things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together.

/büt/

[ techspeak; from by one's bootstraps ]

v.,n. To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon.

/bu̇k tī-tᵊls/

There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in this lexicon under their own entries.

/bonk/, /oyf/

interj. In the MUD community, it has become traditional to express pique or censure by 'bonking' the offending person. There is a convention that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying 'oif!' and a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for bonking and oifing.

See also talk mode, posing.

other jargon:

/bän-dij ən(d) di-sə-plən laŋ-gwij/

A language (such as Pascal, Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of 'right programming' even though said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated 'B&D'; thus, one may speak of things "having the B&D nature".

See Pascal; oppose languages of choice.

/bäm/

1. v. General synonym for crash (sense 1) except that it is not used as a noun; esp. used of software or OS failures.

"Don't run Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll bomb."

/boynk/

[USENET: ascribed there to the TV series "Cheers" and "Moonlighting"]

1. To have sex with; compare bounce, sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant 'Bonk' is more common.

2. After the original Peter Korn 'Boinkon' USENET parties, used for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area.

/bohr buhg/

[from quantum physics]

n. A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions.

Antonym of heisenbug; see also mandelbug.

/bō-gəs/

adj. 

1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus."
2. Useless. "OPCON is a bogus program."
3. False. "Your arguments are bogus."
4. Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus."
5. Unbelievable. "You claim to have solved the halting problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus."

6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas."