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The New Hacker's Dictionary

hackish /hak'ish/ adj.

(also hackishness n.)

1. Said of something that is or involves a hack.

2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also true-hacker.

hackishness // n.

The quality of being or involving a hack. This term is considered mildly silly. syn. hackitude.

hackitude // n.

syn. hackishness; this word is considered sillier.

hair // n.

[back-formation from hairy] 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!")

hairball // n.

1. [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a store-and-forward network is failing to forward when it should. Often used in the phrase "Fido coughed up a hairball today", meaning that the stuck messages have just come unstuck, producing a flood of mail where there had previously been drought.

2. An unmanageably huge mass of source code. "JWZ thought the Mozilla effort bogged down because the code was a huge hairball."

3. Any large amount of garbage coming out suddenly. "Sendmail is coughing up a hairball, so expect some slowness accessing the Internet."

hairy // adj.

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


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