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bum

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Acronyms, Idioms, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.06 sec.
1.bum - To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night bumming the interrupt code." In elder days, John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed hackers among his students to "ski bums"; thus, optimisation became "program bumming", and eventually just "bumming".
2.bum - To squeeze out excess; to remove something in order to improve whatever it was removed from (without changing function; this distinguishes the process from a featurectomy).
3.bum - A small change to an algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump instruction faster."

Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by v. tune (and tweak, hack), though none of these exactly capture sense
4.bum - All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent dialects of English "bum" is a rude synonym for "buttocks".


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"The man with the red tie" (that was my cosmopolite), said he, "got hot on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supply of the place he come from by the other guy.
The jackal then invigorated himself with a bum for his throttle, and a fresh application to his head, and applied himself to the collection of a second meal; this was administered to the lion in the same manner, and was not disposed of until the clocks struck three in the morning.
And it never goes high up, or sharp, or squeaky, or scratchy, like some women's voices when they're mad, or fresh, or excited, till they remind me of a bum phonograph record.
 
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