How to find what your phone number spells | Hacker News Reader

How to find what your phone number spells

stevehanov.ca

5 pointsdpatru13 comments

My phone number spells : Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

The site he linked to (dialabc) doesn't seem to work - http://www.phonespell.org/ demonstrates what he's talking about though.

Ditto.

On another page he says that the feature on that doesn't work for IE6. I wonder if this is a browser issue. I'm running IE7 (I know, I know, don't ask) what are you running?

I got the same error on Camino 2.0b3.

I'm sure someone around here could whip up a Python script to do this fairly easily (at least on a nix system with a dictionary file).

Or a Perl script that looks like an ASCII telephone.

Or a Ruby DSL.

...

Go!

A question for dpatru: what browser did you use?

http://stevehanov.ca is a respected site with some really cool stuff. The fact that the telephone number bit doesn't work is surprising and unusual for the site, and I'm interested in why it's not working. The question was intended to try to pin down why it didn't work.

I'm confused as to why I got downvoted. It's not a complaint, I accept that perhaps someone feels the question is of negative value to this site. Fine. But an explanation as to why would be appreciated.

Help me to understand.

> Internal Server Error

For Firefox 3.0.

Take home lesson: don't promote your website at HN if it's broken.

The post is dated 2007-04-07 18:35:22, which is almost 2.5 years ago. I suppose the world moved on since then.

I found the post interesting. Coincidentally I just used one of these number to letter sites last night, looking for an 800 number to buy. Didn't even occur to me that they hadn't just brute-forced the solution.

i'm pretty sure the correct way to do this is to identify (in linear time) all the words which correspond to substrings of the number(s), then use dynamic programming

You guys fell for this? Really?

This wreaks of those email scams where you enter your license # or SSN on a 'government' website to see if you qualify for some made up crap.

Do you really think we used genuine phone numbers?

Like I care - I get telemarketing calls anyway. And you 'wreak' havoc, but bad-smelling things 'reek'.

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