13 stories on the front page, newest first. Scroll down to watch the site change over time.
![Screenshot of web.mit.edu: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2026/6/12/31f86412-6671-406f-b1af-e0a219ac3803.jpg)
722 points by sam_bristow | 243 comments
A 2001 California Management Review paper by Nelson Repenning and John Sterman on why process improvement programs often fail and how to create and sustain them.
618 points by giancarlostoro | 104 comments
Trey Harris's classic sysadmin story about a university department that couldn't send email farther than about 500 miles, and the debugging that explained why.
![Screenshot of web.mit.edu: Integer Programming (1977) [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2025/9/8/77a62ade-5569-4c11-8cb5-ab534fee585d.jpg)
3 points by Tomte | 0 comments
![Screenshot of web.mit.edu: Percolation Theory [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2025/3/11/31767434-1f8e-47df-8d24-7ec858919476.jpg)
42 points by mindcrime | 9 comments
![Screenshot of web.mit.edu: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2024/2/23/1a50fb96-906f-43b9-a5a6-fcb9c7fd47e0.jpg)
881 points by Jtsummers | 390 comments
PDF of Repenning and Sterman's 2001 California Management Review paper on why organizations underinvest in process improvement and capability building.
![Screenshot of web.mit.edu: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2023/11/29/d799edaa-9d9b-4068-adbf-ae0219628dce.jpg)
1065 points by dvrp | 182 comments
Trey Harris's classic sysadmin story about a statistics department that could not send email farther than about 500 miles, traced to a sendmail misconfiguration and timeouts.
48 points by Lammy | 24 comments