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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the "worst way to ask a user for a telephone number" UI, after one UI forced the user to select each digit in a 0-9 dropdown.

The specific one I'm thinking of is just spit out a scrollable numeric string of Pi, and make the user scroll until their phone number was the digits of Pi that matched it.

My (7 digit) phone number occurs after digit position 9_000_000, and occurs 21 times in the first 200_000_000 digits.

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I think it is still not proven that Pi contains all possible strings.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/216343/does-pi-cont...

But it contains all possible phone numbers.

(Assuming that phone numbers are less than, say, 100 digits.)

I wonder if you gave away your phone number there? Or how many 7 digit numbers match those criteria?

7 digits is barely a phone number in most of the United States anymore, most places outside of rural areas require 10 digit dialing and hide it behind carrier dial plans - I mean in the way a rural person can dial one, two, or three digits because all land lines in an area have the same area code, prefix, and possibly additional digits in common.

There can't be a better way to get a date with a number theory nerd.

Doubt it. OP effectively have us 5+4 bits of entropy, whereas a 7 digit phone number probably has 23 bits.

My phone number is already "out" in terms of being on the internet, and I can change it pretty easily if it became an ACTUAL security issue.

But it would be an interesting exercise to do, I guess.

https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world...

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