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•11mo ago

Comments

buildsjets•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
(2003)
throw0101b•11mo 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•11mo ago
Are there any public, open, comprehensive datasets on flights?
dieselerator•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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/

I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program

https://honeypot.net/2026/04/14/i-wrote-to-flocks-privacy.html
285•speckx•2h ago•122 comments

YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-worlds-largest-media-company-2025-tops...
89•bookofjoe•5d ago•57 comments

Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/13/thousands-of-rare-concert-recordings-are-landing-on-the-interne...
379•jrm-veris•6h ago•106 comments

Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

https://bandaancha.eu/articulos/telefonica-consigue-bloqueos-ips-11731
316•akyuu•3h ago•275 comments

Claude Code Routines

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/routines
185•matthieu_bl•3h ago•116 comments

5NF and Database Design

https://kb.databasedesignbook.com/posts/5nf/
83•petalmind•3h ago•33 comments

California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/14/eff_california_3dprinted_firearms/
55•Bender•55m ago•14 comments

Turn your best AI prompts into one-click tools in Chrome

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/skills-in-chrome/
35•xnx•2h ago•17 comments

A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijacking
772•zdw•16h ago•448 comments

Modifying FileZilla to Workaround Bambu 3D Printer's FTP Issue

https://lantian.pub/en/article/modify-computer/modify-filezilla-workaround-bambu-3d-printer-ftp-i...
35•speckx•2h ago•34 comments

Let's Talk Space Toilets

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/lets-talk-space-toilets
68•zdw•21h ago•19 comments

guide.world: A compendium of travel guides

https://guide.world/
26•firloop•5d ago•4 comments

OpenSSL 4.0.0

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/releases/tag/openssl-4.0.0
95•petecooper•2h ago•21 comments

Show HN: LangAlpha – what if Claude Code was built for Wall Street?

https://github.com/ginlix-ai/langalpha
65•zc2610•5h ago•22 comments

Show HN: Plain – The full-stack Python framework designed for humans and agents

https://github.com/dropseed/plain
20•focom•2h ago•5 comments

Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others

https://rareese.com/posts/backblaze/
813•rrreese•11h ago•502 comments

ClawRun – Deploy and manage AI agents in seconds

https://github.com/clawrun-sh/clawrun
7•afshinmeh•51m ago•0 comments

jj – the CLI for Jujutsu

https://steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/introduction/what-is-jj-and-why-should-i-care.html
429•tigerlily•9h ago•365 comments

The Mouse Programming Language on CP/M

https://techtinkering.com/articles/the-mouse-programming-language-on-cpm/
32•PaulHoule•3d ago•3 comments

Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-from-clown-show-to-v1-0-c239d9a407ec
13•martythemaniak•45m ago•1 comments

Carol's Causal Conundrum: a zine intro to causally ordered message delivery

https://decomposition.al/zines/
28•evakhoury•4d ago•2 comments

Introspective Diffusion Language Models

https://introspective-diffusion.github.io/
203•zagwdt•12h ago•39 comments

Show HN: A memory database that forgets, consolidates, and detects contradiction

https://github.com/yantrikos/yantrikdb-server
20•pranabsarkar•4h ago•14 comments

Show HN: Kontext CLI – Credential broker for AI coding agents in Go

https://github.com/kontext-dev/kontext-cli
54•mc-serious•6h ago•21 comments

Nucleus Nouns

https://ben-mini.com/2026/nucleus-nouns
44•bewal416•4d ago•11 comments

Show HN: Kelet – Root Cause Analysis agent for your LLM apps

https://kelet.ai/
36•almogbaku•3h ago•18 comments

The acyclic e-graph: Cranelift's mid-end optimizer

https://cfallin.org/blog/2026/04/09/aegraph/
58•tekknolagi•4d ago•15 comments

DaVinci Resolve – Photo

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/photo
991•thebiblelover7•17h ago•254 comments

The M×N problem of tool calling and open-source models

https://www.thetypicalset.com/blog/grammar-parser-maintenance-contract
106•remilouf•5d ago•36 comments

Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug

https://kirancodes.me/posts/log-who-watches-the-watchers.html
365•bumbledraven•19h ago•164 comments