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story by Robert A. Heinlein, who calls it the devil theory' of sociology. Heinlein's popularity in the hacker culture makes plausible the supposition that 'Hanlon' is derived from 'Heinlein' by phonetic corruption. A similar epigram has been attributed to William James, but Heinlein more probably got the idea from Alfred Korzybski and other practitioners of General Semantics. Quoted here because it seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in sig blocks, fortune cookie files and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks. This probably reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments created by well-intentioned but short-sighted people. Compare Sturgeon's Law. |
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happily adv. Of software, used to emphasize that a program is unaware of some important fact about its environment, either because it has been fooled into believing a lie, or because it doesn't care. The sense of 'happy' here is not that of elation, but rather that of blissful ignorance. "The program continues to run, happily unaware that its output is going to /dev/null." Also used to suggest that a program or device would really rather be doing something destructive, and is being given an opportunity to do so. "If you enter an O here instead of a zero, the program will happily erase all your data." |
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haque /hak/ n. [Usenet] Variant spelling of hack, used only for the noun form and connoting an elegant hack. that is a hack in sense 2. |
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hardcoded adj. 1. Said of data inserted directly into a program, where it cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in some profile, resource (see de-rezz sense 2), or environment variable that a user or hacker can easily modify. 2. In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a #define macro (see magic number). |
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hardwarily /hard-weir' -lee/ adv. In a way pertaining to hardware. "The system is hardwarily unreliable." The adjective 'hardwary' is not traditionally used, though it has recently been reported from the U.K. See softwarily. |
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hardwired adj. 1. In software, syn. for hardcoded. 2. By extension, anything that is not modifiable, especially in the sense of customizable to one's particular needs or tastes. |
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has the X nature [seems to derive from Zen Buddhist koans of the form "Does an X have the Buddha-nature?"] adj. Common hacker construction |
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