[HN Gopher] The Hacker's Dictionary
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The Hacker's Dictionary
Author : derealized
Score : 88 points
Date : 2023-07-29 13:13 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hackersdictionary.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hackersdictionary.com)
| rolph wrote:
| http://catb.org/jargon/html/online-preface.html
| mjb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Just search Jargon File on here for the many similar/related
| posts.
|
| Created a new account just to submit this? Welcome.
| dang wrote:
| 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
|
| http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.7.dos.txt
|
| http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html
|
| * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| dang wrote:
| _The Jargon File_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33259797 - Oct 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Jargon File_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31574352 - May 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Jargon File_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658797 - Oct 2020 (4
| comments)
|
| _The Jargon File_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331642 - May 2020 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Jargon File_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424833 - Feb 2018 (1
| comment)
|
| _Jargon File moved to github_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6887903 - Dec 2013 (10
| comments)
|
| _Jargon File moved to github_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884756 - Dec 2013 (3
| comments)
|
| _The Original Hacker 's Dictionary (1988)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5269170 - Feb 2013 (24
| comments)
|
| _The Jargon File_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469112 - June 2010 (4
| comments)
|
| _The Jargon File_ -
| 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 - July 2008 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Jargon File_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=148423 - March 2008 (1
| comment)
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
| EarlKing wrote:
| Better solution: Just make your own for whatever project you're
| working with. AIWORD was originally a product of Stanford's AI
| community. Let it rest and make a dictionary that reflects the
| usage of your own group.
|
| ..........and mercilessly mock Eric Raymond for his
| pretensions. :D
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| even when it is written down, things don't stick across the
| internet. we're still having gif vs jif pronunciation debates
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Well concerning GIF it's obviously soft G because it stands
| for Giraffics Interchange Format. Does it not?
| mepian wrote:
| The original version of this dictionary:
| 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."
| jejones3141 wrote:
| Perhaps the thing to do is put it in a git repository, so
| people can retrieve the version they want.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Here are two versions of the original jargon file from
| AI:HUMOR; free of ESR's pollution:
|
| AI:HUMOR;MITSAI JARGON (25.3 KB):
|
| https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/mitsai.j...
|
| AI:HUMOR;JARGON > (85.3 KB):
|
| https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/jargon.6...
|
| Also NASA jargon:
|
| https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/nasa.jar...
|
| Alice's PDP-10 is also a classic:
|
| https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/alices.p...
| There was all kinds of mean nasty ugly people there on the
| bench... Chaosnet designers... Lisp hackers... TECO
| hackers. TECO hackers right there on the bench with
| me! And the meanest one of them, the hairiest TECO
| hacker of them all was coming over to me. And he was
| mean and nasty and horrible and undocumented and all kinds of
| stuff. And he sat down next to me and said:
| [1:i\*^Yu14<q1&377.f"nir'q1/400.u1>^[[8
| .-z(1702117120m81869946983m8w660873337m8w1466458484m8
| )+z,.f^@fx\*[0:ft^]0^[w^\ And I said "I didn't get
| nothing, I had to rebuild the bittable in queue six"
| and he said: [1:i\*^Yu16<q1&77.+32iq1f"l#-1/100.#-
| 1&7777777777.'"#/100.'u1r>6c^[[6
| .(675041640067.m6w416300715765.m6w004445675045.m6 45544
| 5440046.m6w576200535144.m6w370000000000.m6),.fx\*[0:ft^]0^[w^\
| bear8642 wrote:
| Are these meant to just be incomprehensible, or is there some
| translation possible?
|
| Haven't heard the song for awhile.
| deepspace wrote:
| > in the process, he essentially destroyed what held it
| together
|
| Not only that, but the man's disgusting political and social
| views tarnished everything he touched.
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There is U+2422 Blank Symbol ().
| gumby wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Interesting stuff. Perhaps add an alias hashbang for shebang.
| tgv wrote:
| No true hacker will say hashbang.
| dylan604 wrote:
| here here. "hashbang that script will ya?" is something no
| self respecting hacker would ever say.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| So fun. Some favorites:
|
| Big Room: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/Big-
| Room.html
|
| Bogo-Sort: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bogo-
| sort.html
|
| Bug-For-Bug Compatible:
| http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/bug-for-bug-comp...
|
| Fence-post Error:
| http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/fencepost-error....
|
| Magic Smoke: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/magic-
| smoke.html
|
| One-Banana Problem
| http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/one-banana-probl...
|
| Tail Recursion: http://www.hackersdictionary.com/html/entry/tail-
| recursion.h...
| dylan604 wrote:
| tail recursion reminds me of the "how to keep an ______
| occupied" rock. being from texas, the blank is usually "aggie".
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| 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.
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