frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

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•9mo ago

Comments

buildsjets•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
(2003)
throw0101b•9mo 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•9mo ago
Are there any public, open, comprehensive datasets on flights?
dieselerator•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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/

Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues

https://noheger.at/blog/2026/02/12/resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe-the-saga-continues/
457•erickhill•8h ago•196 comments

GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex-spark/
696•meetpateltech•14h ago•288 comments

MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
33•stickynotememo•2h ago•18 comments

Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you

https://skipthe.tips/
266•randycupertino•7h ago•160 comments

Gemini 3 Deep Think

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-deep-think/
818•tosh•15h ago•521 comments

An AI agent published a hit piece on me

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
1720•scottshambaugh•15h ago•706 comments

AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/commit/3dca5e45d5ad05460b93410087833cbaa624754e
179•sitole•7h ago•60 comments

Asimov (YC W26) Is Hiring

1•lningthou•1h ago

Tell HN: Ralph Giles has died (Xiph.org| Rust@Mozilla | Ghostscript)

167•ffworld•9h ago•6 comments

Ring owners are returning their cameras

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/shopping/ring-owners-are-returning-their-cameras-here-s-how-m...
52•c420•1h ago•14 comments

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/rust_cpp/
10•lukastyrychtr•5d ago•0 comments

Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

https://pol.is/home2
236•mefengl•13h ago•85 comments

My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood

https://sampatt.com/blog/2025-12-13-my-grandma-was-a-fed-lessons-from-digitizing-hundreds-of-hour...
122•SamPatt•4d ago•31 comments

Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed

http://blog.can.ac/2026/02/12/the-harness-problem/
648•kachapopopow•18h ago•247 comments

Japan's Dododo Land, the most irritating place on Earth

https://soranews24.com/2026/02/07/take-a-trip-to-japans-dododo-land-the-most-irritating-place-on-...
58•zdw•5d ago•14 comments

Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

https://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceled
372•c420•8h ago•194 comments

Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/ro-on-6th-gen-waymo-driver
200•ra7•15h ago•202 comments

How a cat debugged Stable Diffusion (2023)

https://blog.dwac.dev/posts/cat-debugging/
47•lukasgelbmann•4d ago•7 comments

Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

https://atha.io/blog/2026-02-12-viva
498•thatha7777•17h ago•335 comments

The Nature of the Beast

https://cinemasojourns.com/2026/02/07/the-nature-of-the-beast/
6•jjgreen•4d ago•0 comments

Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere

114•kmansm27•14h ago•134 comments

The Wonder of Modern Drywall

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-wonder-of-modern-drywall/
27•zdw•4h ago•39 comments

New Nick Bostrom Paper: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence [pdf]

https://nickbostrom.com/optimal.pdf
49•uejfiweun•3h ago•43 comments

Recoverable and Irrecoverable Decisions

https://herbertlui.net/recoverable-and-irrecoverable-decisions/
56•herbertl•8h ago•18 comments

Evaluating Multilingual, Context-Aware Guardrails: A Humanitarian LLM Use Case

https://blog.mozilla.ai/evaluating-multilingual-context-aware-guardrails-evidence-from-a-humanita...
15•benbreen•9h ago•0 comments

Apache Arrow is 10 years old

https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2026/02/12/arrow-anniversary/
211•tosh•18h ago•58 comments

Show HN: Sol LeWitt-style instruction-based drawings in the browser

https://intervolz.com/sollewitt/
52•intervolz•2d ago•9 comments

Mapping the Moon: The Apollo Transforming Printer

https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2025/12/mapping-the-moon-the-apollo-transforming-printer/
12•bryanrasmussen•3d ago•0 comments

Synthesizer Cartridge for the Atari 2600

https://www.qotile.net/synth.html
21•harel•4d ago•3 comments

How to Have a Bad Career – David Patterson (2016) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn1w4MRHIhc
75•rombr•13h ago•22 comments