I should preface this by saying that I love Project Euler--I spent a ton of time there while learning to program. I also am impressed by anyone who volunteers to create something for the community, and invests effort in maintaining it.<p>However, not storing emails, and thereby giving up account recovery with the explanation that it's about security is a shit sandwich.<p>My email is <myfirstname>.<mylastname>@gmail.com, a pattern I share with millions of people. This is public information. I could spray paint my email address on local bridges without in any way making my email less secure (cops might complain, though).<p>I understand that some people have reasons to have private email addresses that they don't want released (they'll give them to family, but not the general public). They should never sign up for anything with those email addresses, because the moment you sign up for things, you will almost certainly be entered in a database somewhere, and eventually be spammed or subjected to whatever other bad consequences you're concerned about.<p>Account recovery is a basic feature of a website (except those that contain data too sensitive to have account recovery), and they're giving it up for phantom security.
As far as I'm aware, Project Euler doesn't make any actual money, so you have to give the team behind it a lot of kudos for actually taking the time to get it back up and running.<p>Must have been really tempting to just sack it off as a bad job. Congrats to the team!
If Project Euler is trying to make itself less interesting to hackers/less vulnerable by storing less information(email), why don't they consider OAuth for login?<p>I know OAuth has it's own warts, but isn't part of the point to offload the burden of authentication to someone else?<p>Also, feel free to replace OAuth with Mozilla Persona or OpenID.<p>[edit] - s/storing less password/storing less information\(email\)/
> The decision to no longer store any private/personal information in no way reflects a lack in confidence of the steps we have taken to make the new website secure, but if history teaches us one thing it is that for every "unsinkable" Titanic built there will always be icebergs.<p>I love PE and I don't intend this question snarkily at all, but am genuinely curious why securing a database of emails for a site as simple as PE would be such a perilous problem? I know security in general is always more difficult that it appears, but in this case I would have thought we were dealing with a solved problem. I'd love to hear about why my assumptions are wrong.
I have been curious for a while:<p>What is in the opinion of the HN community a good score on Project Euler?<p>For which scores do you tip your figurative hat?
<i>Who</i> returns, Project Euler?<p>Neither the news page, nor the "about" page, nor the front page of "Project Euler" care to explain what this website is all about. Of course, I can guess that it has to do with mathematical problems of some sort.<p>It is sad if you have to turn to Wikipedia to find out the basic details about a website. A sentence or two of introduction would have made everything better :-)
I created an account but couldn't log in.
As I've had the same happen before, I tried using only the first 32 characters of my password when logging in. That worked.<p>Remember kids: Most software development isn't about puzzle solving and algorithms, it's about making stuff like forms work properly.<p>Of course the puzzles and algorithms are fun, which is why I'm signing up for PE again!
Btw, anyone has a list of subset tasks on this Project Euler more related to pure CS/Algorithms rather than Math? Preferably mentioned the level of experience. So far, as I can see, it is aimed for very beginners, right?
Well, I'm glad I have a git repo of all my solutions, so I can get back up to my original 102 problems solved. And then go back to not doing it again because it is too hard now.