Why we don’t need phone numbers | Hacker News Reader

Why we don’t need phone numbers

hackaday.com

18 pointsfogus26 comments

The correct syntax is: sip:yourname@yourdomain.com

This is already a solved problem.

SIP and DNS SRV/NAPTR records are the relevant (IETF) standards. The "sip:" part above is actually optional. Using NAPTR records, I can simply request yourname@yourdomain.com, and your DNS will tell me how I can contact you (via email, via Jabber/XMPP, via SIP, /dev/null, etc.) in order of preference.

Indeed, the article shows a complete ignorance of the real world. Who is going to type "phone://www.your_company’s_domain.com/customer_service" into a phone? How could you even remember that? SIP does this correctly by using email addresses, but traditional phone numbers are still preferable since all existing phones have numerical keypads. What the author really wants is for his phone to use NAPTR, and for the people he is calling to include SIP or POTS entries for their email addresses.

The benefit of the current system is the network effect: Any phone, no matter if it's 50 years old or an iPhone 3GS, can dial any other such phone. In the entire world. Of course new technology can make that work in a smarter way (not that I'll take advice on "smart" from someone who thinks not capitalising sentences serves a purpose), but not without breaking backwards compatibility, which would severely limit the utility of such a switch.

Anyway, it's done. It's in SIP, it's in Skype, any cellphone has a phonebook build in, and most smartphones can dial directly from a Facebook friend-listing. I can dial 411 and be connected to anyone by name in a matter of seconds.

i'm not convinced... i kind of like the anonymity a telephone number affords.

Agreed. I don't want anyone to be able to guess my cell number & spam call me, why would anyone want that?

Moreover, people who want to change how phone addressing works rarely consider the fact that the people who can email me are not the same people who I want to call me on voice. Or the fact that sometimes I change my number with the intent of denying that ability to people who knew the old number. Or the fact that the region-locality of numbers often yields useful information about the person on the other end.

These are social problems with simple technical solutions. Making it default to going to voicemail, with only a whitelist of callers ringing through, is one possible solution. Having it respond with a message that suggests using email instead is probably the one I would use, since I hate phone calls from just about everybody, except family.

> These are social problems with simple technical solutions.

that don't work.

I'd much rather change phone numbers than screw around with a whitelist and the other solution is worse than whitelists because it connects my phone number to my e-mail, which I don't give out. (Thanks to various directory services, phone numbers provide location information. Why would I want my e-mail to get geo-targetted spam?)

Then use something like an URL shortener to get as many anonymous phone addresses as you like.

Heck, this is just replacing a numeric unique-identifier with a textual unique-identifier. Many companies have already gone this route by getting phone numbers that spell clever things according to the letters on the phone keypad.

Technology has completely obviated the need to remember phone numbers anyway, so overhauling the whole system at this point would be a complete waste.

Wouldn't it be much better to keep phone numbers, but leave them in the "backstage"?

In a few years (let's say, 10 years) most (not to say, ALL) phones will have internet access, and also access to DNS servers.

Why don't create a DNS entry that points to our real number? We can give people an unique entry in our domain that they can remember, old-skool people will be able to still use numbers (even if we have to add a few more digits if we run out of number ranges). And change provider without worrying about our numbers (I always take a new number when switching provider, but having some kind of DNS entry wouldn't be a bad idea).

And, technically, implementing a DNS entry type for numbers should be dead easy.

I've heard from a few family members that ever since they've started using their cell phones, they can't remember anyone's numbers, and they felt this was making them stupider. As if memorizing sequences of 7 digits is desirable and conducive to being intelligent. I tried explaining that they shouldn't have to memorize phone numbers - they don't represent anything real, they aren't convenient, and there's no advantage to using them. It's much easier to put a number in your Contacts list and reach someone using their name instead, at which point the technology is strictly empowering, and like TFA says, the number is just for backwards compatibility.

Remembering numbers is a form of mental exercise that we used to engage in regularly, and as exercise it was good for the brain, just like stretching.

You seem to have the implicit model where the less we burden the brain with mundane tasks, the better, as if we had a fixed daily capacity for thought, or that mundane tasks are somehow wasteful.

I'm not sure this is the case--neither that mundane applications of brainpower is burdensome, nor that capacity is fixed.

I suspect that someday, after more and more mundane mental tasks are replaced by more automation and better design, a market will emerge for mental fitness clubs to help thin the "fog" that will come to characterize our mental lives..

The brain does have a fixed daily capacity, but it is far higher than what we use in average. My prick with phone numbers is not that remembering them on itself is wasteful, but simply that people seem to change phone numbers so often (due to lost, broken, change of company, etc) that I stopped bothering to remember them. Also, I play Sudoku and Dual N-Back in a daily basis to keep my mind sharp.

[Unfortunate double post there...]

Point taken, though I do suspect there is a qualitative difference between solving Sudoku puzzles and practicing one's capacity for direct recall. Sudoku is algorithmic--you're focused on how to solve, rather than building up an index of solutions which you would then access by key.

eg, 6x7 is a key, the lookup yields 42, and you could work it out algorithmically, and that might include methods like "type expression into Google", but imagine if that was all you knew. No index of multiplication tables in your head. When you skimmed a text, your eyes would gloss "6x7" as "multiplication product--undetermined". There might be a pointer to a method to get the answer, but the answer itself wouldn't be directly available. It could be quite crippling.

Similarly with language: our facility of direct recall, our capacity for internalization, makes communication possible. If you are consciously working through the grammar that gives meaning to a phase, you have lost the discussion.

In programming, we get so much mileage out of the "how" that the "what" becomes incidental. Our mental map is a map of methods, where return values only persist long enough to call the next method. We know how we got there, but hardly remember any landmarks along the way.

So with phone numbers, we have lost one more opportunity to train and practice our capacity to create mental indexes to actual data. Why remember one number when you can remember how to get all numbers with less effort? Why store multiple keys when a single function will do?

People once developed algorithms to create vast mental indexes, eg. method of loci. One could commit incredible volumes of information to memory with such techniques.

Now compare that to the modern person w/ lazy evaluation in place of memorization. In memorization, lookup costs are zero. Consciousness stays focused on the matter at hand. Supporting data is pulled up as needed. Without memorization, consciousness must make repeated detours to supply the supporting data, or gloss over it all together.

I'd suggest that mastery of a subject occurs when consciousness can stop making these detours. When you know the behavior of various programming constructs by heart, you can stop checking the reference documentation at every turn.

So in aggregate, if you no longer know any phone numbers by heart, you may indeed be getting dumber.

That's why I play Dual-N Back as well. It is an exercise meant to train direct recall, very short-time and short-time memory.

Ah, I missed that. Cheers.

Remembering numbers is a form of mental exercise that we used to engage in regularly, and as exercise it was good for the brain, just like stretching.

You seem to have the implicit model where the less we burden the brain with mundane tasks, the better, as if we had a fixed daily capacity for thought, or that mundane tasks are somehow wasteful.

I'm not sure this is the case--neither that mundane applications of brainpower is burdensome, nor that capacity is fixed.

The problem is that there are lot of situations where you need to make a phone call with a phone that isn't yours. Most common one, especially with modern smartphones, is that your phones battery is dead. In such situations its helpful to remember phone numbers.

The problem with not memorizing phone numbers occurs when you don't have your contacts list with you. Automatic synchronization of your list to multiple places is a partial solution.

I would be happy to see the end of (human-readable) URLs too. I think they're holding the net back the same way telephone numbers are becoming a drag on, er, telephony.

I fully agree, and it's already happening!

Average users have long-since stopped telling each other their phone numbers or keying them in more than once -- you search for the person on Facebook and their number is in their profile -- then you put it in your cell phone's contacts and never think about it again. With Facebook apps on some phones, you never have to see the number at all!

URLs are headed the same direction -- users don't type in domain names much less URLs, and DNS is not trustworthy, but Google is. Chrome's OmniBar already makes interpretation as a URL not the default when it is confident enough in its search results.

As an added bonus, the disappearance of meaningful domain names and URLs will hasten the death of "False REST" -- Hypermedia will finally be The Engine Of Application State!

These URLs are hilariously and unnecessarily geeky.

I'd prefer picking up a phone and dialing "dcurtis" or "edw519." That should ring all associated phones until the person is reached. If I want to only ring a certain phone, I'd dial "dcurtis.mobile" or "dcurtis.work".

There's no reason the device should be attached to the dialing system. When I pick up a phone, I intend to speak to someone. The network should facilitate that.

I dunno, I prefer

867-5309

over

phone://saw.your.name.and.number.of.the.wall.voice/jenny_jenny_who_can_i_turn_to

Maybe you would like phone://j.mp/jenae better.

Man, thats going to scale well. More like (p:)j.mp/jen38js09

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