This is excruciatingly difficult. I have no experience with this sort of a test, and the method that I chose (albeit quickly and without a whole lot of thought) was to pick four sides that were touching, and try to find the one pattern that didn't have the same four sides touching.

This logic obviously didn't work, because I got 1 / 9. Does anyone have a strategy for this, or is it pure logic?

I found it easier to pick and compare opposite faces.

This didn't work for exactly 3 of them (the ones with repeated symbols), so went with educated guesses there.

Curiously, I got 6/9.

Man, I love The Impossible Game. Have you beat all four levels? I'm stuck on the "let's flip all this shit upside down randomly" level.

I haven't got past the first level, but that is the reasoning behind the first link. Short-term memory only lasts for so long and there is only so many things you can keep. Angry Birds is something you can play naturally with only your instincts. For a challenge you have to get three stars.

At its core, both The Impossible Game and Angry Birds are simple, but one is more successful to past to the next level. If you get one star on Angry By Birds, you can pass. On The Impossible game you have to have timing and be aware of what is coming up. I suspect this is the reason why the original Super Mario Bros. became so popular.

Thanks a lot for this link. When I was trying to quit smoking, I would always have a full pack and would rationalize "Well, it would be a waste of money to throw this pack out now."

I knew there must be a name for this irrational thinking, and that article taught me a lot.

Thanks again.

Hmm, interesting idea. Obviously a parody, but it makes a few valid points, that's for sure.

For the problems he's talking about, I would make this point:

From my experience, after taking away features and just focusing on user experience, iOS 1.0 beats Android 2.x in nearly every category. Even back then, everything just worked on iOS.

If I recall correctly, Zerigo's (http://zerigo.com) Watchdog service has a free tier.

I've used their monitoring and DNS hosting for a while, and have been thrilled with everything; performance, service, control panel.

This looks pretty interesting. Thanks for the tip!

Is it really better to use? HN is incredibly simple, and everything works as expected. There's a few UI quirks with reddit that I don't particularly like. For example: I don't think it's obvious to a new user how to submit a story. Second (and this might be a personal preference) clicking the reddit logo in the header should take you to the main page for that subreddit, not reddit.com. Particularly when said subreddit has a customized logo.

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I think this is a valid idea. There's many times where there's things I'd like to discuss that is similar to, or related to, topics covered by Hacker News, but that I don't post here because I don't want to dilute the topics here with things that some people might not want.

A HN subreddit (or a subreddit with this purpose, not necessarily tied to the Hacker News name; maybe there is one already?) could solve this.

If this saves me say, 10 seconds, I'd love to say that it would add up over the course of a year...

But in reality, I'm probably saving about ten seconds a year.

I couldn't agree more. Really don't see what the big deal is. In a perfect world, they wouldn't be selling my data, and I wouldn't have to pay for all the services I use.

In the world we have, though, I'll take what I can get.