Don't beat yourself up so much, it's challenging to the majority of developers.
The article itself sums things up well "Most of the puzzles are in the realm of either string processing (somewhat applicable to programming), logic puzzles (not really applicable to most programming), or stupid gotchas in the input format (annoyingly, very applicable to most programming)."
The article itself sums things up well "Most of the puzzles are in the realm of either string processing (somewhat applicable to programming), logic puzzles (not really applicable to most programming), or stupid gotchas in the input format (annoyingly, very applicable to most programming)."