Thanks for this informative article!

An English tip: "alas" is a word used for something negative.  For example, 

"Alas, he had three flat tires and had to miss the wedding."

For your sentence, you could use a positive term like "Happily" or "Fortunately" or "Take heart" or "Don't worry" of "cheer up" or …

"Take heart, this article …"

Once you've been in China long enough these numbers find their way in to your own life - it's difficult to ignore them once you get the gist. It's pretty simple:

0 means "you"

1 pronounced yī means "you" and pronounced yāo means "want" or "going to"

2 means "stupid"

4 means "die/death"

6 means "good luck"

8 means "good luck"

13 (Shanghai) means "crazy/foolish"

18 means "going to get rich"

250 means "stupid"

...

So any variations of the above 'bad' numbers is not good, and any variation of the 'good' numbers is great!

NB: the number one is often pronounced yāo when read individually from a group of numbers. For e.g., when quoting your telephone number; 138 1111 8888, you would say yāo sān bā yāo yāo yāo yāo bā bā bā bā

@Hilda, unfortunately some people do, but I would ignore such things so if these things are equivalent then I'll just ignore them too.

Just want to say, 發 and 八（8） doesn't have the same pronouciation, simply sound similar like mandarin do.

And to Mr Ma, is not about if we, chinese, actually believing it. These are rituals, traditions. Like the people at backstage would say break a leg instead of good luck. Like 13 and black cat in the western world. Are the westerner actually believing these nowadays? Though I have to say, as a warm reminder, some of us do mind a lot about these things, especially the older generations. So, better not to ignore them.