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/

Qwen3-Max-Thinking

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3-max-thinking
204•vinhnx•2h ago•118 comments

MapLibre Tile: a modern and efficient vector tile format

https://maplibre.org/news/2026-01-23-mlt-release/
296•todsacerdoti•7h ago•64 comments

France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

https://twitter.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
113•bwb•1h ago•68 comments

Television is 100 years old today

https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2026/01/tv100.html
42•qassiov•2h ago•6 comments

What "The Best" Looks Like

https://www.kuril.in/blog/what-the-best-looks-like/
42•akurilin•1h ago•16 comments

Exactitude in Science – Borges (1946) [pdf]

https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf
47•jxmorris12•2h ago•15 comments

Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/24/google-ai-overviews-youtube-medical-citations-...
165•bookofjoe•3h ago•82 comments

OSS ChatGPT WebUI – 530 Models, MCP, Tools, Gemini RAG, Image/Audio Gen

https://llmspy.org/docs/v3
53•mythz•2h ago•10 comments

The mountain that weighed the Earth

https://signoregalilei.com/2026/01/18/the-mountain-that-weighed-the-earth/
11•surprisetalk•51m ago•0 comments

Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager

https://www.jampa.dev/p/lessons-learned-after-10-years-as
384•jampa•4d ago•96 comments

Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone

https://github.com/kxzk/snapbench
84•beigebrucewayne•6h ago•46 comments

After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

https://atmoio.substack.com/p/after-two-years-of-vibecoding-im
423•mobitar•3h ago•279 comments

The Holy Grail of Linux Binary Compatibility: Musl and Dlopen

https://github.com/quaadgras/graphics.gd/discussions/242
167•Splizard•9h ago•124 comments

OracleGPT: Thought Experiment on an AI Powered Executive

https://senteguard.com/blog/#post-7fYcaQrAcfsldmSb7zVM
31•djwide•2h ago•20 comments

DHS keeps trying and failing to unmask anonymous ICE critics online

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/instagram-ice-critic-wins-fight-to-stay-anonymous-as-...
29•duxup•37m ago•1 comments

First, make me care

https://gwern.net/blog/2026/make-me-care
724•andsoitis•22h ago•217 comments

The browser is the sandbox

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/the-browser-is-the-sandbox/
272•enos_feedler•12h ago•151 comments

Porting 100k lines from TypeScript to Rust using Claude Code in a month

https://blog.vjeux.com/2026/analysis/porting-100k-lines-from-typescript-to-rust-using-claude-code...
98•ibobev•3h ago•58 comments

Find 'Abbey Road when type 'Beatles abbey rd': Fuzzy/Semantic search in Postgres

https://rendiment.io/postgresql/2026/01/21/pgtrgm-pgvector-music.html
3•nethalo•4d ago•0 comments

Text Is King

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king
106•zdw•5d ago•44 comments

TSMC Risk

https://stratechery.com/2026/tsmc-risk/
86•swolpers•6h ago•49 comments

Is It Time for a Nordic Nuke?

https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/is-it-time-for-a-nordic-nuke/
51•ryan_j_naughton•59m ago•53 comments

QMD - Quick Markdown Search

https://github.com/tobi/qmd
10•saikatsg•6d ago•3 comments

Transfering Files with gRPC

https://kreya.app/blog/transfering-files-with-grpc/
42•CommonGuy•4h ago•13 comments

Blade Runner Costume Design (2020)

https://costumedesignarchive.blogspot.com/2020/12/blade-runner-1982.html
36•exvi•5d ago•8 comments

Runjak.codes: An adversarial coding test

https://runjak.codes/posts/2026-01-21-adversarial-coding-test/
17•todsacerdoti•4d ago•2 comments

Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-identify-brain-waves-that-define-the-limits-of-you
268•mikhael•17h ago•75 comments

Vibe coding kills open source

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15494
240•kgwgk•4h ago•224 comments

The future of software engineering is SRE

https://swizec.com/blog/the-future-of-software-engineering-is-sre/
221•Swizec•19h ago•110 comments

LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-35389-6
174•bookofjoe•19h ago•160 comments