awesome-naming

Abbreviating long words by keeping the first and last letter and writing the number of omitted letters in between.

Acronyms describing competing database ideologies (aka. SQL vs. NoSQL). Note that acid and base are also opposites in chemistry.

A central part of a network/application that significantly limits throughput/performance and should ideally be eliminated.

When your device is so corrupted, it virtually turns into a brick.

Different case styles where the name illustrates its appearance.

Writing a program in as few characters as possible. Just like how Golf players try to win in the fewest club strokes.

Allows classes with incompatible interfaces to work together by wrapping its own interface around that of an already existing class.

Adds new responsibilities to an object by wrapping it in a layer of additional behavior, just as you can decorate a room without changing its walls.

Analogous to a facade in architecture, a facade is an object that serves as a front-facing interface masking more complex underlying structure.

An anti-pattern where a single object knows too much or does too much. Like a god, it is omniscient and omnipotent.

A representation of a result that is available in the future, unless there are errors. Like in reality, promises are broken sometimes.

A programming antipattern where, in a single change, you wildly add code everywhere in your codebase.

A mechanism allowing models to selectively focus on the most relevant parts of their input, just as humans direct their attention to what matters most.

A tabular summary of a classifier's "confusion", i.e., how often it thought to make correct predictions when it actually didn't.

A boundary dividing the space of possible data points. Here you decide, everything on this side is SPAM, everything on that side is not.

Randomly disabling neurons during training to prevent overfitting. Like a sports team that improves by practicing with random members absent.

Minimizing a cost function by iteratively computing the gradient and moving in the direction of steepest descent.

A confident response by an AI that does not seem to be justified by its training data.

A method of bypassing normal authentication in a computer system.

A secret value placed on the stack to detect buffer overflow attacks. If it has been altered, danger is near — just like a canary in a coal mine that warns miners of toxic gas.

A computer program that self-replicates by

Steps and practices that users should take to maintain system health and improve online security.

Part of a system meant to look like an attractive target but actually helps detect and deflect attackers.

Refers to the use of lures to "fish" for sensitive information.

When you explore a search space and you reach a dead end, you follow your

Violence is actually almost always a solution, but not a very clever one.

An algorithm that finds a solution by always picking the currently best-looking option without thinking too much about past and future decisions.

Starting somewhere in the hilly "landscape" of solutions, you go in the direction of steepest ascent until reaching the top of a hill. You might miss higher hills, though.

A type of priority queue and a reference to the infamously unorganized queues in Israel. Here items can

In this data structure, items are always added at the end and removed at the front as if the items were waiting in line.

A grid-based layout resembling the compartmentation of bento boxes.

Navigational aid allowing users to keep track of their location within programs, documents, or websites. The term is a reference to the fairy tale

A kind of animated slideshow looping back on itself.

Where you temporarily put

The metaphorical top of the user's desk, upon which objects such as documents and folders of documents can be placed.

A button to toggle a menu. The associated icon resembles a hamburger.

Sandboxing tool forming a protective layer for your system.

Terminal app to keep MacOS from "sleeping".

A JavaScript library implementing the actor model for concurrent computation. The term is a reference to George Clooney, who is also an actor.

Database application, that is marketed as being so fault-tolerant and resilient as a cockroach.

The process that turns metal into rust (literally), but also a tool that "turns" C++ into Rust.

Like

Turing machines that produce numbers so insanely large, no other algorithm can keep up with them.

The problem of finding groups of mutual friends in a network of people with friendship relations. Or more generally, finding complete subgraphs.

A game world that showcases how astonishing complexity can arise from very simple ingredients.

A black box that magically gives answers even to undecidable questions like the halting problem.

The fact that in some formal languages any sufficiently long string can be