chainik - The Jargon File

[Russian, literally “teapot”] Almost synonymous with muggle. Implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn, but does not necessarily imply as little experience or short exposure time as newbie and is not as derogatory as luser. Both a novice user and someone using a system for a long time without any understanding of the internals can be referred to as chainiks. Very widespread term in Russian hackish, often used in an English context by Russian-speaking hackers esp. in Israel (e.g. “Our new colleague is a complete chainik”). FidoNet discussion groups often had a “chainik” subsection for newbies and, well, old chainiks (eg. su.asm.chainik, ru.linux.chainik, ru.html.chainik). Public projects often have a chainik mailing list to keep the chainiks off the developers' and experienced users' discussions. Today, the word is slowly slipping into mainstream Russian due to the Russian translation of the popular yellow-black covered “foobar for dummies” series, which (correctly) uses “chainik” for “dummy”, but its frequent (though not excessive) use is still characteristic hacker-speak.