frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning [pdf] (2003)

http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/ITA-software-travel-complexity.pdf
76•rochoa•1y ago

Comments

buildsjets•1y ago
This is well over 20 years old and is based on pre 9/11 flight data. I would suspect that a lot has changed since then. So proceed with no caution at all.
gwern•1y ago
Since these sorts of things usually only get more and more complex over time, I would guess that it's all still true, but much more so.
throw0101b•1y ago
(2003)
throw0101b•1y ago
The PDF was produced by ITA, which famously used Common Lisp:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

From 2001, a message from the same author as the linked paper:

> (Here's an email Carl de Marcken of ITA Software sent to a friend, describing their experiences using Lisp in one of the software industry's most demanding applications.)

* https://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html

Qem•1y ago
Are there any public, open, comprehensive datasets on flights?
dieselerator•1y ago
> Are there any public, open, comprehensive datasets on flights?

Airlines and commercial aviation operators schedule their own flights. That is a dynamic schedulle. So, perhaps there is no "comprehensive data set".

However, FlightAware makes publicly available scheduled and completed flight data over many routes in the USA. You can search by route and get a list of flights.

Flight information includes filed departure time, route of flight, and speed. For completed flights actual time, altitude, and route is shown. For example, a search on the route Dallas/Fort Worth to Austin lists 45 flights.

I hope that helps.

foundart•1y ago
A very interesting dive into, as the title says, the computational complexity of air travel planning. Graph algorithms with lots of complexity added due to the wide variety of fare conditions that airlines have dreamt up over the years.

The article may be from 2003 but I would call it an evergreen. While I imagine some of the details have changed since then, I suspect that the complexity has only grown since then.

foundart•1y ago
It makes me wonder: Would an airline that drastically simplified its fares be more likely to appear in flight search results?

Simplifying the fares would make it less computationally expensive and, in theory, could take fewer steps to answer a flight planning query.

Imagine a flight search planner that, say, fanned out N airline-specific workers when handling a planning query and then displayed to the user whatever results it got back within some time limit. If FooAir had simple fares, the FooAir searcher would likely run faster than searchers for other airlines. Thus it would be more likely to return results for more queries, assuming the deadline is fairly tight because of usability metrics. (People don't tend to stick around waiting for slow results.)

sjburt•1y ago
At least a few years ago (~2014), the fare search was actually nearly instant, but all major airfare search sites added a delay because customers had the impression they were getting a better deal when they had to wait. It seems like the delay has been dialed back lately.
teleforce•1y ago
This is a very popular article that get submitted every now and then (nearly every year) [1].

I think this kind of problem would be a very nice for logic, optimization and constraint programming that probably can be solved with modern tools like Google OR-Tool or Monash University MiniZinc [1],[2],[3].

[1] Past:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Computational%20Complexity%20o...

[2] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]:

https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk

[3] Google OR-Tools:

https://developers.google.com/optimization

[4] MiniZinc:

https://www.minizinc.org/

John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

https://apnews.com/article/john-deere-right-to-repair-agriculture-equipment-cb7514ffedb95c130a976...
931•djoldman•12h ago•177 comments

Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/9703/Spider-venom-kills-varroa-mites-without-harming
159•Jedd•6h ago•66 comments

Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

https://www.networkworld.com/article/4192827/meta-reuses-old-ram-in-new-servers-with-custom-bridg...
81•ihsw•5d ago•21 comments

Bonnie Tyler, singer of Total Eclipse of the Heart, dies aged 75

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5pd9z2487o
16•theanonymousone•1h ago•1 comments

My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite

https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.html
150•kristoff_it•1h ago•75 comments

EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0 – Breyer: "Our children lose out"

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/eu-parliament-greenlights-chat-control-1-0-breyer-our-children-l...
51•rapnie•38m ago•18 comments

Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives

https://www.howtogeek.com/why-developers-are-ditching-github-for-codeberg-and-self-hosting-altern...
167•Gedxx•3h ago•130 comments

I Built the Only 2026 WWII Jeep

https://www.theautopian.com/i-bet-my-company-on-an-impossible-jeep-build-then-a-miracle-happened/
62•martey•2d ago•11 comments

In-browser programmable robot simulator

https://bittlex-sim.petoi.com/
30•lijay•5d ago•0 comments

Cargo-nextest: 3x faster than cargo test, per-test isolation, first-class CI

https://nexte.st/
123•nateb2022•3d ago•31 comments

The Field Equation, living shader geometry folded into a breathing object

https://sand-morph.up.railway.app/the-field-equation
10•echohive42•1w ago•1 comments

How Donkey Kong Toppled Atari

https://dfarq.homeip.net/how-donkey-kong-toppled-atari/
38•giuliomagnifico•6h ago•11 comments

Separating signal from noise in coding evaluations

https://openai.com/index/separating-signal-from-noise-coding-evaluations/
223•sk4rekr0w•14h ago•81 comments

Benchmarking coding agents on Databricks' multi-million line codebase

https://www.databricks.com/blog/benchmarking-coding-agents-databricks-multi-million-line-codebase
108•tanelpoder•14h ago•41 comments

CollectWise (YC F24) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/collectwise/jobs/P646Yw6-founding-account-executive
1•OBrien_1107•4h ago

Cloudflare Drop

https://www.cloudflare.com/drop/
455•coloneltcb•16h ago•249 comments

Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents

https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/
301•chenglong-hn•17h ago•113 comments

Grok 4.5

https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5
670•BoumTAC•17h ago•1059 comments

Show HN: Yamanote.fun – A complete soundscape for Tokyo's Yamanote line

https://www.yamanote.fun/
192•madebymagnolia•1d ago•43 comments

Why is there smoke from the boiler room? – Botanical Garden using Home Assistant

https://vooijs.eu/posts/why-is-there-smoke-from-the-boiler-room/
3•Baardappel•2d ago•0 comments

Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete

https://seriot.ch/computation/uts35/
110•beefburger•1d ago•29 comments

Turning a pile of documents into a searchable useable knowledge base

https://github.com/linuxrebel/DocuBrowser
153•linuxrebe1•15h ago•35 comments

Rewriting Bun in Rust

https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
633•afturner•13h ago•371 comments

Patching MechCommander's "left arm bug" for fun and profit

https://mhloppy.com/2026/05/mechcommander-weapons-left-arm-bug-fix/
76•Narann•3d ago•23 comments

New Sweden: the US's long-lost 'secret' colony

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260629-new-sweden-the-uss-long-lost-secret-colony
134•bookofjoe•16h ago•47 comments

3D Airplane tracker on Mercator map

https://github.com/jamalrfordii-arch/Vanguard-Map
21•Lawyer24•4d ago•3 comments

Chatto is now open source

https://www.hmans.dev/blog/chatto-is-open-source
993•speckx•20h ago•272 comments

Apache Shiro security framework releases 3.0.0

https://shiro.apache.org/blog/2026/06/apache-shiro-300-released.html
39•lprimak•2d ago•5 comments

Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

https://tris.sherliker.net/blog/obfuscated-self-evaluating-bash-script-by-cdn-akamai-being-suppli...
1391•speerer•1d ago•219 comments

TypeScript 7

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-7-0/
643•DanRosenwasser•19h ago•257 comments