NP-: /N·P/, pref. Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality
of difficulty; the connotation is often ‘more so than it should
be’. This is generalized from the computer-science terms NP-hard and NP-complete; NP-complete problems all seem to
be very hard, but so far no one has found a proof that they are. NP is the
set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial problems, those that can be completed
by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a
polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one
NP-complete problem would solve all the others. “Coding a BitBlt
implementation to perform correctly in every case is
NP-annoying.”
Note, however, that strictly speaking this usage is misleading; there
are plenty of easy problems in class NP. NP-complete problems are hard not
because they are in class NP, but because they are the hardest problems in
class NP.