The New Hacker's Dictionary

Halloween Documents // n.

A pair of Microsoft internal strategy memoranda leaked to ESR in late 1998 that confirmed everybody's paranoia about the current Evil Empire. These documents praised the technical excellence of Linux and outlined a counterstrategy of attempting to lock in customers by "de-commoditizing" Internet protocols and services. They were extensively cited on the Internet and in the press and proved so embarrassing that Microsoft PR barely said a word in public for six months afterwards.

hammer // vt.

Commonwealth hackish syn. for bang on.

hamster // 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. A tailless mouse; that is, one with an infrared link to a receiver on the machine, as opposed to the conventional cable.

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

HAND //

[Usenet: very common] Abbreviation: Have A Nice Day. Typically used to close a Usenet posting, but also used to informally close emails; often preceded by HTH.

hand cruft // vt.

[pun on 'hand craft'] See cruft, sense 3.

hand-hacking // n.

1. [rare] 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.

2. [common] More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans.