The New Hacker's Dictionary

For further enlightenment, study the "Principia Discordia", "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "The Joy of Sex", and the Christian Bible (Revelation 13:18). See also Discordianism or consult your pineal gland. See also for values of.

randomness // n.

1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance.

2. A hack or crock that depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the combination upon which the crock depends for its accidental failure to malfunction). "This hack can output characters 40-57 by putting the character in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting six bits -- the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing." "What randomness!"

3. Of people, synonymous with 'flakiness'. The connotation is that the person so described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or inappropriately for reasons which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are probably as inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to pass with time. "Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's just randomness. See if he calls back."

Despite the negative connotations jargon uses of this term have, it is worth noting that randomness can actually be a valuable resource, very useful for applications in cryptography and elsewhere. Computers are so thoroughly deterministic that they have a hard time generating high-quality randomess, so hackers have sometimes felt the need to built special-purpose contraptions for this purpose alone. One well-known website offers random bits generated by radioactive decay. Another derives random bits from images of Lava Lite lamps. (Hackers invariably find the latter hilarious. If you have to ask why, you'll never get it.)

rape // vt.

1. To screw someone or something, violently; in particular, to destroy a program or information irrecoverably. Often used in describing file-system damage. "So-and-so was running a program that did absolute disk I/O and ended up raping the master directory."

2. To strip a piece of hardware for parts.

3. [CMU/Pitt] To mass-copy files from an anonymous ftp site. "Last night I raped Simtel's dskutl directory."

rare mode // adj.

[Unix] CBREAK mode (character-by-character with interrupts enabled). Distinguished from raw mode and cooked mode; the phrase "a sort of half-cooked (rare?) mode" is used in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode. Usage: rare.