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Comment by matt_f | Hacker News Reader

If you're pissed off by this, as I am, here's how the author politely suggests that you direct your support:

> There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS

> (please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks.)

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Note that the author also requests that people be polite in doing so. Everyone please model the behavior you want to see in this reporter.

Update: Thanks OP for updating to include a note about this.

Sorry for the unrelated question, but I'm not from the US and I'm curious, what does this mean?

844-NYTNEWS

Do landlines phones have letters in the US? Is it pressing a number several times?

And also mentioning that I'm grateful for SSC to exist. I rarely comment but it's a refreshing community.

You may find this relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad#Letter_mappin...

You press the number on the dial pad which also has the letter in question. Just once.

This is just a popular (in the US?) way to make numbers easier to remember.

I see, so it's not like in the old mobile phones where you have to press a bunch of times to get a letter, just once. It's a clever custom.

It's not a "custom". The reason keypads have letters is precisely because the letters are mnemonics for the real number. This usage predates mobile phones, and is not US-specific.

They were originally used for area codes (Wikipedia lists a UK example of 0AY6, ie 0296, for Aylesbury), then later for mnemonic numbers like the one from the article. Mobile phones inherited the lettered keypad from landlines and also started using it for typing text messages.

It is definitely a custom limited to some particular countries.

Wikipedia: The use of alphanumeric codes for exchanges was abandoned in Europe when international direct dialing was introduced in the 1960s, because, for example, dialing VIC 8900 on a Danish telephone would result in a different number to dialling it on a British telephone. At the same time letters were no longer placed on the dials of new telephones.

(The very next paragraph after the one you quoted talks about how letters for European mobile phones were reintroduced some time later, now standardized so as to not have that problem.)

At any rate, the presence of lettered keypads doesn't mean people * had * to make mnemonic phone numbers with them, and it does look like (in Europe) only the UK had such numbers.

Apart from the US and UK, they might be popular in some Commonwealth countries too. I grew up in one and remember having them.

Yes, but only for SMS messages. They are not commonly used to write phone numbers (very occasionally you can see them now, but the numbers are also written below or next to them).

In the early automatic telephone years, letters were also used in the Netherlands, France, Denmark and other countries, but they fell out of use way before most people here were born, and also they were mostly (only?) used for area codes and exchange names/numbers, not subscriber numbers.

Sure, but the keypad for the phone app on your iPhone or Android has letters on it.

Duh. Who ever denied that?

Well, the OC was confused as to how letters can be translated into an actual phone number. This should be obvious to anyone that has ever dialed a number on their mobile phone, i.e. OC.

They were specifically asking about landlines. And referring to the method of pressing a number several times to get the correct letter on a mobile phone (i.e., when texting). So they explicitly mentioned that they have seen the letters. However, when dialling a number, they used the numbers, not the letters.

Right. The point is... landlines have nothing to do with it.

Letters are associated with numbers on a phone keypad. This is not a US-only thing. It is not a mobile only thing. It is not a land-line only thing. Keypads, all over the world, have letters on them. Letters (in the same way they are on phone keypads) can be seen on other numerical entry devices, like a keypad for a secure door.

As to pressing a number multiple times when texting, a half-second of thought would make it clear that this wasn't the case. Are you telling me it would be reasonable for OC (or anyone) to think that the NYT's phone number translated from

> 844-NYTNEWS

> 844-669998663397777

It was obviously a weird idea, so they were posing it as a question, which is not a strange thing to do if you've never encountered it. Meanwhile, you keep making assumptions based on your own experience which is different from that of others, and stating obvious things from which you then manage to draw wrong conclusions by interpreting them in an obviously incorrect time or context. (I didn't downvote you btw.)

Well, I've never seen this in Spain or any other country I've been in continental europe. It could just be that I didn't pay attention though.

> This usage predates mobile phones

Indeed -- it dates back to the 1920s. At that time, phone numbers in the US started to be formed from a 2-letter exchange code followed by 5 (or sometimes 4) digits. For instance, "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (dialled 736-5000) was the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, and also the title of a 1940 hit song.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number

> was the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania

Still is!

Mobile phones took this cue from telephones, which have had this kind of notion of an associated set of alphabetic characters since at least the eighties or nineties.

Since the 1920s actually, for the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#United_States

>In the most areas of North America, telephone numbers in metropolitan communities consisted of a combination of digits and letters, starting in the 1920s until the 1960s. Letters were translated to dialed digits, a mapping that was displayed directly on the telephone dial.

Much earlier. Except that in most of the world they fell out of use before telephones became a common household item, so for people who grew up between, very roughly, the 60s and early 90s, mobile phones were the first phones with letters on them. We had heard about those strange phone "numbers" with letters in them via American television shows, of course.

Yep, apologies if I wasn't clear. I said "at least" since the late eighties and nineties since that's around when I first became coherent enough of a human to notice. I didn't intend it to be interpreted as "around" the eighties and nineties.

You're thinking of T9, which is for typing text. When you dial 800-AAAAAAA, you're not typing, you're dialing. The "A" character is just on the same button as the "2". So when you press "A" seven times you're really pressing "2" seven times. You end up dialing 800-2222222. There's nothing funny happening, "A" is just another symbol printed on the "2" button.

I think your example would be better if you used B, as A only takes a single press in T9.

This refers to the letters that are on phone keypads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad#/media/File:T...

      1  |  2  |  3  
         | ABC | DEF 
    -----|-----|-----
      4  |  5  |  6  
     GHI | JKL | MNO 
    -----|-----|-----
      7  |  8  |  9  
    PQRS | TUV | WXYZ
    -----|-----|-----
      *  |  0  |  #  
         |  +  |

Now 0800-INFO becomes 0800-4636 — you just press the key corresponding to the letter once.

Your chart isn’t quite right— Q and Z aren’t (or weren’t) generally present: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#/media/File...

Depends, I used to have one of these: https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=39&topicid=114...

Though the chart is still wrong according to that, however it (the chart) does match what my Android phone's dialer looks like.

the Q & Z assignments shown are typical. That said, few text-based phone numbers include these characters, for the obvious reason.

You're correct, which appropriately enough is why you're downvoted. The letters were placed on telephone dials when telephone ‘numbers’ used a mnemonic exchange+digits format¹, so there was no requirement to include the entire alphabet. Advertising mnemonics like the one in the grandparent comment came later, and entering arbitrary text such as names, which actually requires the whole alphabet, much later.

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names

They were generally present beginning in the 1980s. The phone you linked is from the 1960s. The layout with Q and Z was standardized by ITU-T in 1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.161

Earlier in time the letter "O" was also not generally on phone keypads.

According to your link, Q and Z were officially added sometime in the 1990’s, in a later revision. That puts the official change well into my childhood, which explains my out-of-date information; I didn’t put much effort into researching my comment.

mobile phones have letters on their dial pads also.

Do you guys really feel that you're on the right side of history by harassing an investigative journalist?

Yes. Doxxing people whose only crime is producing good but complex content for the world to enjoy is cyberbullying. If bullies are on the right side of history I have no interest in the metric.

Doxxing, what? What do you think journalism is? It's very common for controversial authors with a very wide reach to be "revealed" and investigated? How do you know that this is "cyber bullying" after just reading one side of the story?

People seem have lost all sense of objectivity due to some sort of idolatry.

Scott is widely known for his impeccable mental honesty, even-handedness, and general niceness. There's a strong prior that what he says is, to the best of his knowledge, both true and presented in such a way as to reflect reality.

Well, now this 'controversial' author has been silenced; given that it reduced the number of places with better writing than the NYT, I would bet it will be permanent. Is that what you wanted?

He has certainly not been silenced in any way shape or form. Him closing his blog is just a way to create outrage, it has no effect in whether the NYT article will be published with his name or not.

In short: yes.

To expand: nobody here is harassing the journalist. The journalist harassed the blogger. The commenters are providing polite, critical feedback.

How can you possibly know this?

The doubt you are trying to introduce is exactly the doubt that Scott Alexander has about his well being once exposed to the readership of the NYT (or anyone else in the world who catches a whiff of it).

If you think the journalist should enjoy being able to do what they want without an Internet mob, then why wouldn't you think the same way about Scott?

Harassing journalists for doing their job (we don't even know what kind of article this is yet) and revealing the real name of some blogger that has barely hidden their full name either way is worlds apart. The outrage, if there would even be one, that the latter would get would also be because of their own writings. If you write on controversial topics and have a large following you can't expect some sort of total anonymity. That's just naive to the point of stupidity.

Harassing?

Investigative?

> Harassing?

What do you expect to happen when this kind of crowd ("rationalists") calls or mail-spam a journalist that's "attacking" their idol?

> Investigative?

Ok, just journalist then, does it matter?

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