Tayste
/tāst/
noun — “just enough data to sample before committing to the whole meal.”
(also written as taste)
Tayste is hacker jargon for a quantity of 2 bits. It continues the long-running food-themed naming convention that produced terms such as nybble, Byte, playte, and dynner. If a byte is a bite and a nybble is a smaller snack, then two bits became a tayste... not enough for a meal, just enough to get an impression.
Superprogrammer
/sü-pər-prō-gra-mər/
noun — “a code-flow anomaly capable of turning ideas into software at unnatural speed.”
Right Thing
/rīt thiŋ/
noun — “the supposedly obvious solution that somehow still starts arguments.”
Right Thing refers to the solution, behavior, design choice, or action considered compellingly correct, elegant, or appropriate within a given technical or conceptual context. The phrase is often spoken with heavy emphasis—as if capitalized verbally—even when the “correct” answer is far from universally agreed upon. In hacker culture and programming discussions, invoking the Right Thing usually implies confidence bordering on philosophy.
Quarter
/kwȯ(r)-tər/
noun — “a fractional coin of memory, equal to two bits and historically more interesting than it has any right to be.”
Quarter is hacker slang for a quantity of 2 bits. The term is rooted in older monetary metaphors that predate computing itself, borrowing from the idea of fractional currency and physical coinage that could be subdivided into smaller pieces for making change.
Quad
/kwäd/
noun — “a compact grouping of four things… or occasionally two bits pretending to be important.”
Playte
/plāt/
noun — “more than a bite, not quite dinner.”
[by analogy with nybble and Byte]
Playte is hacker jargon for a quantity of 16 bits. The term continues the long-running and gloriously unnecessary tradition of naming data sizes after progressively larger meals. If a nybble is a nibble and a byte is a bite, then a larger serving naturally becomes a plate.
Nybble
/ni-bəl/
noun — “half a byte, somehow small enough to sound harmless and important enough to survive decades.”
(alt. nibble) [from the verb nibble, formed by analogy with bite → byte]
Nickle
/ni-kəl/
noun — “the awkward little five-bit quantity that exists mostly because hardware occasionally gets creative.”
[from nickel, the common name for the U.S. five-cent coin]
Nickel is hacker jargon for a data quantity equal to a nybble plus one additional bit—that is, 5 bits. While not a standardized computing unit and rarely encountered in modern systems, the term emerged as playful technical slang for describing unusual hardware word sizes that did not align neatly with familiar binary boundaries.
Hexadecimal
/hek-sə-ˈdes-məl/
noun — “base sixteen, where digits stop behaving and letters get promoted.”
Hexadecimal is a positional number system with base 16, widely used in computing as a compact representation of binary data. Each digit represents four bits, allowing long binary sequences to be expressed in a shorter, more readable form using symbols 0–9 and A–F.
Hex
/heks/
noun — “six things bundled together, or a number system that looks like it belongs in a spellbook but is actually just base sixteen.”
Hex has two common meanings in hacker slang. The first is a shorthand for hexadecimal, the base-16 numbering system used extensively in computing. The second is a casual grouping term meaning a set of six items, similar in spirit to quad as a four-pack.