I want to alert puzzle writers to a potential cognitive bias I'll call the many-eyes effect. Many people try to solve your puzzle, but only those who succeed post. It's tempting to imagine the posters as typical solvers and forget the many invisible people who tried and got stuck. As a result, yo...

This answer attempts to give guidance for puzzles in general, and riddles in particular where so noted. How does one know what is the acceptable level of "difficulty" To know if your riddle is "acceptable" in difficulty, you first must know how difficult it is. Alas, rating your own p...

And who's supposed to judge the "difficulty rating" of a puzzle? If it's the original poster of the question, that's almost certainly going to be subject to lots of bias. "Oh, I don't want beginners to see my question and annoy me with too-easy responses, so I'll just rate myself '5 stars.'" "I ...

You can do it using HTML >! <pre><code>def invisible_function(): >! print 'Eeek! I feel so naked!'</code></pre> This results in some extra padding, though.

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