Lost and Found | Hacker News Reader

Lost and Found

walzr.com

58 pointswalz15 comments

>When something turns up at a stadium or an airport, staff photograph it, log it, and wait. Hundreds of places use one software tool for managing lost items, and I scraped their archives: thousands of accidental portraits of lost stuff.

Where? What Software? What Archive?

So many photos of peoples lock screens with clearly visible faces...

Picture of a lost iPhone, with a message to call the owner at a phone number. Guess taking pictures was in the job description, and returning lost property wasn't.

scraped from....where? The Lost & Found systems are all public? Sorry I haven't had to dig something out of a lost & found that wasn't a cardboard box under a front desk or whatever...

>Hundreds of places use one software tool for managing lost items, and I scraped their archives

Am I not understanding your question? It's one system - and either their archives are public on purpose, or their endpoints are simply unsecured.

It is scraped from Pixit. They sell lost/found, evidence + seized item management systems. [1] The listings are public; it was cool OP turned this into a mini art piece.

[1] https://www.pixithq.com/

Is there really enough market for an actual software solution like this?

I worked alongside the lost&found office at an old job, we just had a spreadsheet and a book...

Something is wrong with this websites scroll. Perhaps due to pictures loading. It feels that you scroll but see the same pictures.

Walzr's stuff is a fun portal into an earlier era of lighthearted fun internet projects. Keep it up buddy. Bop Spotter is probably still my favorite.

He's right up there with Neal Agarwal (neal.fun) and Nolen Royalty (eieio.games) for me. I recently got to interview Nolen on keeping the internet fun and creative for my blog: https://digitalseams.com/blog/nolen-royalty-on-making-things

very simple design... makes scrolling the page faster.

I was thinking this was directory "lost+found", but it is about "lost and found" at places like airports.

Go ahead and cut a notch out of my expertise card, but in all my years playing with UNIX, I’ve never used that directory.

You don’t use it, the system might in edge cases

I have had items put there a few time on an fsck. Not often but it has happened.

I think the most common use case was when a file descriptor was still open in some process, but the file itself had been completely unlink'd from the filesystem. Most often it was some sort of temporary file.

Anyway the /lost+found link would be its inode number, I think. And then you could recover it after fsck had relinked it into the hierarchy. It would have to put them there, because it had no idea what pathname it had used when it was a real file.

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