:hash bucket: n. A notional receptacle, a set of which might be
used to apportion data items for sorting or lookup purposes. When
you look up a name in the phone book (for example), you typically
hash it by extracting its first letter; the hash buckets are the
alphabetically ordered letter sections. This term is used as
techspeak with respect to code that uses actual hash functions; in
jargon, it is used for human associative memory as well. Thus, two
things `in the same hash bucket' are more difficult to
discriminate, and may be confused. "If you hash English words
only by length, you get too many common grammar words in the first
couple of hash buckets." Compare {hash collision}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
magic number n.
[Unix/C; common] 1. In source code
some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the
operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line
(hardcoded), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a
commented #define....