This looks like straight character substitution, so it's essentially just trial and error, but the best vector for attack is the following:
Look at the shorter words first (2 and 3 character words), guess what one word might be, then match the same characters in the other short words. Once you have a few that seem to pair up, you can start building the longer words from the answers you've got from the shorter ones.
Puzzles like this one isn't far off doing a crossword or sudoku. There isn't really a cypher to it, no maths etc. It's just having the patience to guess at a few placements then seeing if that fits the wider model.
If anyone didn't want to hints then they should have just skipped over the post the moment they read "spoiler alert" rather than knee jerk reacting with a down-vote for a post that others might have found helpful.
I swear to god the use of the peer review system on HN has been in steady decline over the last few years.
If that was the intended design, then perhaps votes should be hidden from users as well, so that we'd never know if we were voted up or down; but, I think the design is intended to somewhat subtly clue us in about whether our opinions and statements are popular, controversial, or whatever. It's a feedback loop, and most forms of conversation involve such indirect feedback loops in the form of non-verbal communication -- though in real-life, it's heavily augmented by body language, facial expressions, voice tone and inflection, etc. We don't have those luxuries here, and so the only non-verbals we're left with are the up-arrows.
It's one thing to receive a single down-vote, hell you can't please everyone, right? However, when you try in earnest to participate in a conversation, and you receive the equivalent of a "shut up" from the crowd, then you're left wondering: did I miss the entire point? Did I accidentally offend someone? Was I factually incorrect?
For a healthy conversational atmosphere, it helps to resolve these issues, so that we can improve our communication -- and hopefully avoid the need for any downvotes in the future.
Some days, I wish I could down vote down votes.
lookup = {c: d for c, d in zip(pattern, word)}
return "".join(lookup[c] for c in pattern) == word
You could read through a few ebooks available on cyptography freely on the internet, but you don't even need to do that in this case, I could just tell you.
The most common letter used in the english language is 'e'. Now identify the dot pattern that is the most common. Voila, you can translate a lot of the code. For the other letters, I would investigate some sort of chart that ranks the most common letters in the English alphabet. With a bit of playing you can do this with a pencil and paper.
Obviously computer cryptography is more advanced, but your question related to this code specifically.
Wouldn't a single message from an unknown cipher be almost impossible to crack? You'd either need to know the algorithm or have multiple encoded messages along with the keys, right?
I'm taking it right now. There's a lot of maths and theory, and it's quite a difficult course, but it's been a great way to learn the foundations of cryptography.
I would think anybody even remotely interested in encryption would know about this 'encryption' (I use the term loosely) method.
I also think such persons would have spotted that this might be a form of that method within a minute, but apparently, I am wrong about that.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...