The New Hacker's Dictionaryhired gun // n. A contract programmer, as opposed to a full-time staff member. All the connotations of this term suggested by innumerable spaghetti Westerns are intentional. hirsute // adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for hairy. HLL /H-L-L/ n. [High-Level Language (as opposed to assembler)] Found primarily in email and news rather than speech. Rarely, the variants 'VHLL' and 'MLL' are found. VHLL stands for 'Very-High-Level Language' and is used to describe a bondage-and-discipline language that the speaker happens to like; Prolog and Backus's FP are often called VHLLs. 'MLL' stands for 'Medium-Level Language' and is sometimes used half-jokingly to describe C, alluding to its 'structured-assembler' image. See also languages of choice. hoarding // n. See software hoarding. hobbit // n. 1. [rare] The High Order BIT of a byte; same as the meta bit or high bit. 2. The non-ITS name of vad@ai.mit.edu (*Hobbit*), master of lasers. hog // n.,vt. 1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat far more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which noticeably degrade interactive response. Not used of programs that are simply extremely large or complex or that are merely painfully slow themselves. More often than not encountered in qualified forms, e.g., 'memory hog', 'core hog', 'hog the processor', 'hog the disk'. "A controller that never gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the bus-hog timer expires." 2. Also said of people who use more than their fair share of resources (particularly disk, where it seems that 10% of the people use 90% of the disk, no matter how big the disk is or how many people use it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one filesystem, they typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete. |