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Powering up a module from the IBM 604: an electronic calculator from 1948

https://www.righto.com/2026/06/ibm-604-thyraton-tube-module.html
37•elpocko•2h ago•6 comments

Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser

https://github.com/yukiyokotani/office-open-xml-viewer
32•maxloh•2h ago•8 comments

Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics

https://www.lms.ac.uk/news/leiden-declaration-on-ai-and-mathematics
15•_____k•47m ago•1 comments

Cloning a Sennheiser BA2015 battery pack

https://blog.brixit.nl/cloning-a-sennheiser-ba2015-accu-pack/
67•zdw•1d ago•13 comments

What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/18154/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-lostfound-folder-in-lin...
41•tosh•2d ago•23 comments

You'll never guess who made the first wireless telephone

https://signoregalilei.com/2026/05/31/youll-never-guess-who-made-the-first-wireless-telephone/
13•surprisetalk•3d ago•0 comments

Making Peace with Your Unlived Dreams

https://nik.art/making-peace-with-your-unlived-dreams/
8•herbertl•1h ago•1 comments

How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

https://performance.dev/how-is-linear-so-fast-a-technical-breakdown
3•howToTestFE•22m ago•0 comments

The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners

https://www.ioccc.org/2025/
327•matt_d•13h ago•76 comments

Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe
156•devenjarvis•8h ago•33 comments

Proliferate (YC S25) is hiring to building open source Codex

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/proliferate/jobs/L3copvK-founding-engineer
1•pablo24602•2h ago

My automated doubt development process

https://www.alexself.dev/blog/automated-doubt
7•aself101•1h ago•6 comments

Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/65697
340•predkambrij•6h ago•181 comments

Backrest – a web UI and orchestrator for restic backup

https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest
36•flexagoon•5d ago•2 comments

Podman 6: machine usability improvements (2025)

https://blog.podman.io/2025/10/podman-6-machine-usability-improvements/
66•daesorin•5h ago•5 comments

Win16 Memory Management

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/win16-memory-management/
119•supermatou•2d ago•58 comments

The curious case of low-protein diets

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/low-protein-diet-animals-live-longer
18•curmudgeon22•46m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Kyushu – A self-hostable WASM sandbox for JavaScript workers

https://kyushu.dev/
64•le_chuck•11h ago•24 comments

Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2849122
169•supermatou•4h ago•75 comments

The Secret Life of Circuits with lcamtuf / Michał Zalewski (Audio Interview)

https://theamphour.com/725-the-secret-life-of-circuits-with-lcamtuf-michal-zalewski/
55•ChrisGammell•3d ago•5 comments

Public Domain Image Archive

https://pdimagearchive.org/
221•davidbarker•19h ago•31 comments

My Software North Star

https://kristoff.it/blog/north-star/
187•kristoff_it•3d ago•114 comments

Speculative KV coding: losslessly compressing KV cache by up to ~4×

https://fergusfinn.com/blog/kv-entropy-coder/
126•kkm•3d ago•21 comments

The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e8e7g0r82o
66•Brajeshwar•3h ago•65 comments

There's no escaping it: an exploration of ANSI codes

https://blog.safia.rocks/2025/12/22/ansi-codes/
19•ankitg12•2d ago•6 comments

sqlite: A CGo-free port of SQLite/SQLite3

https://gitlab.com/cznic/sqlite
18•tosh•5h ago•4 comments

Tokenomics: Quantifying Where Tokens Are Used in Agentic Software Engineering

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14470
156•Anon84•17h ago•65 comments

LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

https://human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev/llms-are-eroding-my-software-engineering-career-and-i-dont...
666•poisonfountain•6h ago•622 comments

Symbolica 2.0: Programmable Symbols for Python and Rust

https://symbolica.io/posts/symbolica_2_0_release/
135•mmastrac•2d ago•11 comments

Valve P2P networking broken for more than 2 months

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets/issues/398
250•babuskov•16h ago•123 comments
Open in hackernews

What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/18154/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-lostfound-folder-in-linux-and-unix
40•tosh•2d ago

Comments

pmontra•1h ago
I had a lost+found folder in all Unix file systems I used since the 80s. It's where fsck places files that it found during a scan and can't figure out to which directory they belong. Sometimes I found stuff in there.

From what I googled XFS, Btrfs and ZFS don't use lost+found. It's a thing of the old not journaled filesystems and of the ext family.

jcalvinowens•33m ago
XFS does use /lost+found, it calls it the "orphanage directory" and xfs_repair reparents children of corrupt directories there.

Based on comments in the kernel source, it seems like the userspace fsck for JFS and F2FS will also sometimes create /lost+found. There might be more that do.

Eikon•9m ago
Even with journaling, you might need one. ZeroFS [0] almost had a lost+found directory (even with the WAL enabled), because you might have consistency issues between your in-memory state and what was flushed, and especially in what order.

ZeroFS ended up not needing recovery at all through strict ordering [1], but it was far from trivial (and not just a matter of requiring a WAL).

[0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS

[1] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS/blob/main/zerofs/src/fs/writ...

FerretFred•1h ago
In a couple of decades running Linux installations of all flavours, I have never seen anything in lost+found!
lokar•55m ago
You need to use worse hardware and bad power :)
FerretFred•45m ago
Umm .. how about a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W powered by a 2000MaH " lipstick style" powerbank?
marcosdumay•19m ago
And more concurrent writes.

But I think ext4 will only let things appear there if you change some default flags.

mixmastamyk•51m ago
Have to run fsck. This used to be forced about once a month but don’t remember it happening in the last decade or so.
JdeBP•50m ago
That's what the answers are missing, of course. In some filesystem formats, it's possible either to recover completely from a journal/intent log, or at least to recover everything to the point that recovered files can be placed into the correct directory.
arendtio
undebuggable•56m ago
lost+found is the Thumbs.db and .DS_Store of Linux
pixelesque•52m ago
Not really, as it's only once per file system mount, whereas those Windows and MacOS files are sprinkled in most directories with images and almost every non-network drive directory respectively.
robrain•49m ago
(2012), maybe?
JdeBP•48m ago
It is StackExchange. So in theory someone could modernize it at any time.
robrain•46m ago
Indeed and I just saw it was edited in 2012 - originally posed in 2011, answers last updated in 2014.
shevy-java•33m ago
I keep everything hidden there.

In reallife I would rename this to "trash".

JdeBP•31m ago
I have a book on my bookshelf, Eric Foxley's Unix for Super-Users. It was published in 1985, and it answers this question on page 52, the first page listed for the entry 'lost+found' in its index.

This is surely not the earliest book mention, is it? (It'll be in earlier man pages, of course.) Google Books does not give me an earlier one, although it does yield another 1985 book.

Fun fact: Foxley cautioned that lost+found must be pre-sized ahead of time, because the fsck of the time did not grow the directory to fit found files.

anonu•18m ago
glad to see that Stack Overflow (or stackexchange.com) is still a thing.
orwin•5m ago
they offer private instances to school too, where moderation is left to school policy, and mine seems to be good enough to use whenever i have frontend questions (i'm 10 year into my career and still use my juniors to answer my frontend questions, i think i won't ever change)
jmclnx•2m ago
lost+found is still used on OpenBSD, seems it is created when needed. Only /home has that directory on my system. IIRC, it was created when a kernel panic happened a few releases ago. Plus some files were placed in it when fsck executed on /home
•
47m ago
Same here. And I had some pretty f**ed up file systems.

At one point, I had one where the directory structure was completely broken and had circles in it (broken SSD). To be fair, in that particular case, I did not look for lost+found and just wrote a tool to extract the data manually that I was looking for.

int0x29•45m ago
My SD cards have always had stuff in that folder. It scares me. I try not to look
pixl97•39m ago
Yea, run an old kernel with ext2 on a busy system writing a bunch of small files and have a power supply fail and you'll end up with something there.

fsck on large hard drives was scary on how long it could take to finish.

Sophira•6m ago
The occassional "Drive has not been checked in <n> days, forcing check" message on bootup got annoying sometimes, yeah. It could easily take tens of minutes to finish, exactly when I wanted to use the computer!

(At least this is what my memory is telling me. I could be mistaken, but that's what I remember.)