8 ms·

The Hacker's Dictionary

174 points by derealized 3y ago

JKCalhoun 3y ago
So fun. Some favorites: Big Room: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/Big-Room.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/Big-Room.html Bogo-Sort: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bogo-sort.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bogo-sort.html Bug-For-Bug Compatible: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bug-for-bug-compatible.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bug-for-bug-comp... Fence-post Error: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/fencepost-error.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/fencepost-error.... Magic Smoke: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/magic-smoke.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/magic-smoke.html One-Banana Problem http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/one-banana-problem.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/one-banana-probl... Tail Recursion: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/tail-recursion.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/tail-recursion.h...
- dylan604 3y ago
  tail recursion reminds me of the "how to keep an ______ occupied" rock. being from texas, the blank is usually "aggie".
- unnouinceput 3y ago
  Bogosort is going to be the best algorithm once quantum computing is fully available. It will be the only algorithm that will be used for the rest of humanity's existence since is the only one that can be 100% parallelized, so it will have the last laugh.
mepian 3y ago
The original version of this dictionary: https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html "This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing; and third, by adding in all sorts of terms which are "jargon" only in the sense that they're technical. This page, however, is pretty much the original, snarfed from MIT-AI around 1988."
- reaperducer 3y ago
  The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable "P"; from the LISP convention of appending the letter "P" to denote a predicate (a Boolean-values function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.) At dinnertime: "Foodp?" I'm old enough to have been active in this era, and to have sent messages on teletypes using the "P" suffix. But for us, it had nothing to do with LISP. Our machines weren't that cool. In fact, they were so lame that many of the printing terminals lacked a question mark character. The P was used as a substitute for a ? because it was the closest visual substitution. And naturally, most of our messages were one or two words for economy. "FOODP" would print correctly on machines that couldn't print "FOOD?" Not everyone had a fancy glass terminal, so you had to assume the worst case scenario, and use "P" in case someone was on paper. On a related note, to make it easier to count spaces in indented code, we would use a "b" character with a slash through it. So the teletype was print b, then back up a space by sending ^H, and then put a / through it. It looked terrible, but got the job done. It used up a lot of ink, but the bosses were watching paper use, not ink.
  - JdeBP 3y ago
    This is the problem with the Hacker's Dictionary. Some of the stuff in it turned out to be just plain not what the people involved were actually doing.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    Wirth silver(?) Pascal book used 'b' overstruck with a backslash when spaces needed to be shown explicitly. I wonder if there's a unicode for that.
    - kens 3y ago
      There is U+2422 Blank Symbol (␢).
  - gumby 3y ago
    "Splitp soup?" "T" We used to even use this in speech sometimes, especially when funny (say, agreeing to share Hot and Sour soup at Mary's, for which the conversation above would work well). Note the amusing pointlessness of p in this case since when speaking you'd pronounce a question anyway.
ranting-moth 3y ago
Interesting stuff. Perhaps add an alias hashbang for shebang.
- tgv 3y ago
  No true hacker will say hashbang.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    here here. "hashbang that script will ya?" is something no self respecting hacker would ever say.
  - ranting-moth 3y ago
    "As for the name: probably something descriptive like "hash-bang" though this has a specifically British flavor, but in any event I don't recall particularly using a pet name for the construction." ‐ Dennis Ritchie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)
  - ralferoo 3y ago
    In the UK ! was (maybe still is) pronounced as "pling". I know I've definitely said hashpling. Actually surprised the American's weren't calling # "pound" then, but maybe that evilness showed up later. But whatever, it's never been a pound symbol in any country that uses pounds! Another interesting fact about # is that in the late 90s or early 2000s, British Telecom tried to gaslight the British public into thinking that # was pronounced "octothorpe". Fortunately, everybody realised this was idiocy, and we all carried on calling it "hash" like we always had.
idlewords 3y ago
It would be great if someone with appropriate "back in the day" credentials would take over membership of this document and powerwash the gratuitous Eric Raymond edits and insertions off of it.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  1) these people are not young and getting older every day, so priorities might change too 2) after a while if person A takes this on, there will be a request to powerwash the gratuitous A’s edits and insertions off of it 3) if the purpose is to have it in pristine state and do no edits, it’s not like old versions have disappeared, just mirror them away
  - fragmede 3y ago
    So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it's up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated. ...this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn't it.
- dtaht 3y ago
  Not enough people born after 1980 have read either version of the dictionary, which is a shame in having a unified vocabulary across more of the internet. A companion volume with new terms, events, and foci would help. I am glad Monty Python, at least, remains popular across old hackers and new.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Without having a real opinion on Esr’s eedits, a snapshot of earlyish hacker culture (whether or not conflating LISP and UNIX) is historically interesting. With tech today so mainstream and with so many subcultures and branches one could of course a glossary but it wouldn’t be the same.
  - 3y ago
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Just search Jargon File on here for the many similar/related posts. Created a new account just to submit this? Welcome.
dang 3y ago
Related threads below. Have I missed one? Surprisingly little over the years. Newer cohorts don't always know the classics/perennials*, so the occasional thread is a good thing - but should we change the link to one of these? https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20perennials&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- dang 3y ago
  The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33259797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33259797 - Oct 2022 (1 comment) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31574352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31574352 - May 2022 (1 comment) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658797 - Oct 2020 (4 comments) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331642 - May 2020 (2 comments) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424833 - Feb 2018 (1 comment) Jargon File moved to github - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6887903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6887903 - Dec 2013 (10 comments) Jargon File moved to github - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884756 - Dec 2013 (3 comments) The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5269170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5269170 - Feb 2013 (24 comments) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469112 - June 2010 (4 comments) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295076 - April 2010 (3 comments) On ESR's continual changing of the Jargon File.. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=239168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=239168 - July 2008 (1 comment) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148423 - March 2008 (1 comment)
  - archo 3y ago
mjb 3y ago
There's a terrible/great genre thriller by Jeffery Deaver called 'The Blue Nowhere'. Whoever ghost wrote it seems to have set themselves the goal of using every word from the jargon file. Unintentionally hilarious.
- gumby 3y ago
  At my book club (mostly us old farts from SU-AI and MIT-AI) someone mentioned that Harry Harrison had read the jargon file when spending time at the MIT AI lab and made a point of using them in conversation. Unfortunately by learning them that way he didn't get any of the context (and wasn't a hacker anyway) so he never used them correctly. (The person who related this anecdote wasn't mocking him, it was just an example while talking about something else, using amusing examples that all of us would know. I don't remember Harrison, but I think I remember Robert Sheckley doing this, not that it matters).
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times. Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists, Linux ate Unix, and there have been several bright subcultures which have no meaningful presence in either edition of the Jargon file. Considering self-professed tribalism of the original authors, it’s hardly surprising. Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms. It would be interesting to have a compilation of jargon as it evolved through the 1990s and 2000s too.
- mepian 3y ago
  Originally it was a document for MIT and Stanford University's AI labs, it was not supposed to keep up with the "hackers at large". Eric Raymond, who was not one of the original authors of the jargon file, decided to appropriate it as his definition of the whole existing hackerdom, which is rather controversial. People from later communities could have written their own jargon files.
  - jonjacky 3y ago
    > People from later communities could have written their own jargon files. There is the IBM Jargon File compiled by Mike Cowlishaw at the IBM UK Laboratories in Hursley. The most recent edition is from 1990. As you might expect, it has more about company traditions and workplace politics than the Guy Steele jargon file or its successors. https://comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf https://comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf
    - mepian 3y ago
      I haven't seen it before, and it's quite interesting and fun. I chuckled at the "lion food" entry. Thank you for sharing it!
  - tjr 3y ago
    I suspect that he has not been involved in this project for a long time, but early on, Eric had the help and support of Guy Steele.
rolph 3y ago
http://catb.org/jargon/html/online-preface.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/online-preface.html
thatxliner 3y ago
Hacker Writing Style > Quotations and punctuation. That part hits hard because it really shows up in my writing (I didn’t know that it was incorrect English grammar until my teacher told me)
MrVandemar 3y ago
I remember discovering this in the early 90s and gleefully reading out the COBOL definition to my COBOL lecturer.

174 points by derealized 3y ago

So fun. Some favorites: Big Room: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/Big-Room.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/Big-Room.html Bogo-Sort: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bogo-sort.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bogo-sort.html Bug-For-Bug Compatible: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bug-for-bug-compatible.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bug-for-bug-comp... Fence-post Error: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/fencepost-error.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/fencepost-error.... Magic Smoke: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/magic-smoke.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/magic-smoke.html One-Banana Problem http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/one-banana-problem.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/one-banana-probl... Tail Recursion: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/tail-recursion.html http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/tail-recursion.h...

dylan604 3y ago
tail recursion reminds me of the "how to keep an ______ occupied" rock. being from texas, the blank is usually "aggie".
unnouinceput 3y ago
Bogosort is going to be the best algorithm once quantum computing is fully available. It will be the only algorithm that will be used for the rest of humanity's existence since is the only one that can be 100% parallelized, so it will have the last laugh.

mepian 3y ago

The original version of this dictionary: https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html "This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing; and third, by adding in all sorts of terms which are "jargon" only in the sense that they're technical. This page, however, is pretty much the original, snarfed from MIT-AI around 1988."

reaperducer 3y ago
The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable "P"; from the LISP convention of appending the letter "P" to denote a predicate (a Boolean-values function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.) At dinnertime: "Foodp?" I'm old enough to have been active in this era, and to have sent messages on teletypes using the "P" suffix. But for us, it had nothing to do with LISP. Our machines weren't that cool. In fact, they were so lame that many of the printing terminals lacked a question mark character. The P was used as a substitute for a ? because it was the closest visual substitution. And naturally, most of our messages were one or two words for economy. "FOODP" would print correctly on machines that couldn't print "FOOD?" Not everyone had a fancy glass terminal, so you had to assume the worst case scenario, and use "P" in case someone was on paper. On a related note, to make it easier to count spaces in indented code, we would use a "b" character with a slash through it. So the teletype was print b, then back up a space by sending ^H, and then put a / through it. It looked terrible, but got the job done. It used up a lot of ink, but the bosses were watching paper use, not ink.
- JdeBP 3y ago
  This is the problem with the Hacker's Dictionary. Some of the stuff in it turned out to be just plain not what the people involved were actually doing.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Wirth silver(?) Pascal book used 'b' overstruck with a backslash when spaces needed to be shown explicitly. I wonder if there's a unicode for that.
  - kens 3y ago
    There is U+2422 Blank Symbol (␢).
- gumby 3y ago
  "Splitp soup?" "T" We used to even use this in speech sometimes, especially when funny (say, agreeing to share Hot and Sour soup at Mary's, for which the conversation above would work well). Note the amusing pointlessness of p in this case since when speaking you'd pronounce a question anyway.

ranting-moth 3y ago

Interesting stuff. Perhaps add an alias hashbang for shebang.

tgv 3y ago
No true hacker will say hashbang.
- dylan604 3y ago
  here here. "hashbang that script will ya?" is something no self respecting hacker would ever say.
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  "As for the name: probably something descriptive like "hash-bang" though this has a specifically British flavor, but in any event I don't recall particularly using a pet name for the construction." ‐ Dennis Ritchie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)
- ralferoo 3y ago
  In the UK ! was (maybe still is) pronounced as "pling". I know I've definitely said hashpling. Actually surprised the American's weren't calling # "pound" then, but maybe that evilness showed up later. But whatever, it's never been a pound symbol in any country that uses pounds! Another interesting fact about # is that in the late 90s or early 2000s, British Telecom tried to gaslight the British public into thinking that # was pronounced "octothorpe". Fortunately, everybody realised this was idiocy, and we all carried on calling it "hash" like we always had.

idlewords 3y ago

It would be great if someone with appropriate "back in the day" credentials would take over membership of this document and powerwash the gratuitous Eric Raymond edits and insertions off of it.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
1) these people are not young and getting older every day, so priorities might change too 2) after a while if person A takes this on, there will be a request to powerwash the gratuitous A’s edits and insertions off of it 3) if the purpose is to have it in pristine state and do no edits, it’s not like old versions have disappeared, just mirror them away
- fragmede 3y ago
  So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it's up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated. ...this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn't it.
dtaht 3y ago
Not enough people born after 1980 have read either version of the dictionary, which is a shame in having a unified vocabulary across more of the internet. A companion volume with new terms, events, and foci would help. I am glad Monty Python, at least, remains popular across old hackers and new.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Without having a real opinion on Esr’s eedits, a snapshot of earlyish hacker culture (whether or not conflating LISP and UNIX) is historically interesting. With tech today so mainstream and with so many subcultures and branches one could of course a glossary but it wouldn’t be the same.
- 3y ago

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Just search Jargon File on here for the many similar/related posts. Created a new account just to submit this? Welcome.

dang 3y ago

Related threads below. Have I missed one? Surprisingly little over the years. Newer cohorts don't always know the classics/perennials*, so the occasional thread is a good thing - but should we change the link to one of these? https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20perennials&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

dang 3y ago
The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33259797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33259797 - Oct 2022 (1 comment) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31574352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31574352 - May 2022 (1 comment) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658797 - Oct 2020 (4 comments) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331642 - May 2020 (2 comments) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424833 - Feb 2018 (1 comment) Jargon File moved to github - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6887903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6887903 - Dec 2013 (10 comments) Jargon File moved to github - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884756 - Dec 2013 (3 comments) The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5269170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5269170 - Feb 2013 (24 comments) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469112 - June 2010 (4 comments) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295076 - April 2010 (3 comments) On ESR's continual changing of the Jargon File.. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=239168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=239168 - July 2008 (1 comment) The Jargon File - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148423 - March 2008 (1 comment)
- archo 3y ago

mjb 3y ago

There's a terrible/great genre thriller by Jeffery Deaver called 'The Blue Nowhere'. Whoever ghost wrote it seems to have set themselves the goal of using every word from the jargon file. Unintentionally hilarious.

gumby 3y ago
At my book club (mostly us old farts from SU-AI and MIT-AI) someone mentioned that Harry Harrison had read the jargon file when spending time at the MIT AI lab and made a point of using them in conversation. Unfortunately by learning them that way he didn't get any of the context (and wasn't a hacker anyway) so he never used them correctly. (The person who related this anecdote wasn't mocking him, it was just an example while talking about something else, using amusing examples that all of us would know. I don't remember Harrison, but I think I remember Robert Sheckley doing this, not that it matters).

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times. Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists, Linux ate Unix, and there have been several bright subcultures which have no meaningful presence in either edition of the Jargon file. Considering self-professed tribalism of the original authors, it’s hardly surprising. Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms. It would be interesting to have a compilation of jargon as it evolved through the 1990s and 2000s too.

mepian 3y ago
Originally it was a document for MIT and Stanford University's AI labs, it was not supposed to keep up with the "hackers at large". Eric Raymond, who was not one of the original authors of the jargon file, decided to appropriate it as his definition of the whole existing hackerdom, which is rather controversial. People from later communities could have written their own jargon files.
- jonjacky 3y ago
  > People from later communities could have written their own jargon files. There is the IBM Jargon File compiled by Mike Cowlishaw at the IBM UK Laboratories in Hursley. The most recent edition is from 1990. As you might expect, it has more about company traditions and workplace politics than the Guy Steele jargon file or its successors. https://comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf https://comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf
  - mepian 3y ago
    I haven't seen it before, and it's quite interesting and fun. I chuckled at the "lion food" entry. Thank you for sharing it!
- tjr 3y ago
  I suspect that he has not been involved in this project for a long time, but early on, Eric had the help and support of Guy Steele.

rolph 3y ago

http://catb.org/jargon/html/online-preface.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/online-preface.html

thatxliner 3y ago

Hacker Writing Style > Quotations and punctuation. That part hits hard because it really shows up in my writing (I didn’t know that it was incorrect English grammar until my teacher told me)

MrVandemar 3y ago

I remember discovering this in the early 90s and gleefully reading out the COBOL definition to my COBOL lecturer.