I was obsessed with Rubik in my youth, and I had a few of those solution tutorial books that told you all the patterns to take to solve the cube from any possible scramble.

My personal best time was 63 seconds.

I owned both official and knock-off cubes, and I found the official cube far superior, merely for reasons of coloring, and also solid construction; it was smoother and it was much less likely to explode in my hands as I cubed at top speed.

I spent inordinate amounts of time in the upstairs bathroom lubricating my cubes with a big tub of Vaseline. My parents never confronted me or even seemed to wonder what I was doing in there; I suppose it was still a bit too early for us to worry about anything morally questionable. But I did go through a lot of Vaseline.

Fun short story: I was the owner of the PuzzleProz ebay store in the mid 00's which was, for awhile, the most popular source of "knock off" speed cubes in the US.

I actually sold Max's family the Red speed cube that you can see him using as a kid in the Netflix documentary "The Speed Cubers"

I have that same cube (model / color) on my desk right now as its one of my favorites.

It was exciting to see the cube in the documentary and to be sure I went back through my order history and found the order.

It was really fun to be part of the speed cubing / puzzle cube community during that time.

Really curious to know the guidelines for the state of the unsolved cube. Clearly some configurations are faster to solve than others discounting the speed of the solver.

That's Max Park. I'm not a cuber but I recognize him from the excellent short documentary The Speed Cubers, on Netflix. It's nerdy, engaging, and heartwarming — perfect for HN.

Unreal. 5 seconds was not broken too long ago. Crazy to see the 3 second barrier looking like a possibility. Pretty astonishing. Is it even possible without skipping some steps?