Article URL: https://openai.com/index/special-projects/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841893 Points: 6 # Comments: 0
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A developer building an open-source mobile money gateway conducted systematic tests on Safaricom's Daraja STK Push API between September 18–23, 2025, using the sandbox environment. A critical finding reveals that the API password is merely Base64-encoded — not hashed — meaning anyone who accesses a request body, debug log, or APM trace can recover the passkey, and no documented revocation endpoint exists. Error code 500.001.1001, widely interpreted as 'transaction does not exist,' was observed returning unreliably even for confirmed live transactions, making it an unsafe basis for payment status decisions. The AccountReference field chosen by the caller is neither idempotency-safe nor echoed back in the response, meaning duplicate submissions can generate two separate payment prompts for a single order. The developer recommends treating request bodies as secret-bearing, building idempotency into the caller's own system, and treating ambiguous error codes as 'unknown — retry later' rather than definitive failures.
Data modelling in Power BI involves organizing tables, defining relationships, and establishing rules that govern how data is stored, filtered, and queried. A flat table structure, where all data exists in a single table, leads to significant redundancy, bloated file sizes, and poor performance. The star schema is the industry-recommended design pattern, featuring a central fact table surrounded by descriptive dimension tables. In a retail example, a FactSales table holds transactional data linked via foreign keys to dimension tables like DimDate, DimCustomer, DimProduct, and DimStore. A well-designed data model improves analytics accuracy and simplifies DAX calculations in business intelligence solutions.
A recently published opinion piece argues that the technology sector needs humanists more than ever. The article, hosted on passo.uno, makes the case for integrating humanities expertise into tech environments. It gained traction on Hacker News, accumulating 14 points and at least one comment. The piece reflects a broader ongoing debate about the role of liberal arts and humanistic thinking in shaping responsible and effective technology development.
A DEV Community tutorial series has culminated in a single Docker Compose configuration that integrates all previously built observability components, including Python and PHP mini-apps, Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana. The key addition in this final article is an OpenTelemetry Collector, which acts as a central intermediary to receive distributed traces from both applications via the OTLP protocol. Previously, apps exported spans directly to the console for testing; now they forward telemetry to the collector, which handles routing to any backend without requiring changes to individual applications. The setup uses a debug exporter to confirm the full pipeline works end-to-end, while noting that a dedicated tracing backend like Grafana Tempo or Jaeger would be needed for visual span exploration. The author positions this as a natural next step for developers looking to deepen their observability practice beyond this introductory series.
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