Most hackers don't smoke tobacco, and use alcohol in moderation if at
all (though there is a visible contingent of exotic-beer fanciers, and a
few hackers are serious oenophiles). Limited use of non-addictive
psychedelic drugs, such as cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, and nitrous oxide,
etc., used to be relatively common and is still regarded with more
tolerance than in the mainstream culture. Use of `downers' and opiates,
on the other hand, appears to be particularly rare; hackers seem in
general to dislike drugs that make them stupid. On the third hand, many
hackers regularly wire up on caffeine and/or sugar for all-night hacking
runs.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
infant mortality: n. It is common lore among hackers (and in the
electronics industry at large his term is possibly techspeak by
now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off
exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until
the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O
devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated
for the machine to start going senile)....
