I do believe that the best engineers of the world read HN. Perhaps this belief is fueled by my recent admiration for the way software engineers solve problems and the intellectual rigor and diversity of submissions and discussions here. Why then, one of us couldn't crack the code left by the victim? I would think that the FBI appeal to the public is more likely to be seen at HN by potential hero of the day than the general readership of NYT.

Here is what I would do:

1. Assign numbers to each symbol 2. Iterate through each word in dictionary and check whether the sequence of numbers or part of the sequence is encountered in the code. 3. If so, then assign the appropriate letters to the symbols in the code and run a regex check on each sequence. Unknown letters can be left as empty space (code doesn't have empty space so it works perfect) 4. Get the results and see if there are alternative sequence matching

Now, I am recently new to programming, but I look up to most of you out there are and if there is any possibility that this can be cracked by programming methodology, then it is one of you that can solve it.