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•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/

LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

https://human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev/llms-are-eroding-my-software-engineering-career-and-i-dont...
293•poisonfountain•1h ago•210 comments

Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/65697
116•predkambrij•1h ago•50 comments

The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners

https://www.ioccc.org/2025/
270•matt_d•8h ago•64 comments

Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap

https://yon-lang.org/
26•amenn•2d ago•10 comments

Win16 Memory Management

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/win16-memory-management/
88•supermatou•2d ago•44 comments

Speculative KV coding: losslessly compressing KV cache by up to ~4×

https://fergusfinn.com/blog/kv-entropy-coder/
99•kkm•2d ago•15 comments

Show HN: Kyushu – A self-hostable WASM sandbox for JavaScript workers

https://kyushu.dev/
18•le_chuck•7h ago•14 comments

Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe
20•devenjarvis•3h ago•1 comments

My Software North Star

https://kristoff.it/blog/north-star/
141•kristoff_it•3d ago•79 comments

How Long Does It Take for a QQuickItem to Become Visible?

https://www.kdab.com/how-long-does-it-take-for-an-item-to-become-visible/
12•jandeboevrie•2d ago•0 comments

Public Domain Image Archive

https://pdimagearchive.org/
174•davidbarker•14h ago•26 comments

9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring

https://9mothers.com/careers
1•ukd1•2h ago

Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2026/cloned-polo-horses
122•gscott•12h ago•54 comments

Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

https://ntsc.rs/
372•gregsadetsky•19h ago•112 comments

Valve P2P networking broken for more than 2 months

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets/issues/398
217•babuskov•11h ago•103 comments

The Secret Life of Circuits with lcamtuf / Michał Zalewski (Audio Interview)

https://theamphour.com/725-the-secret-life-of-circuits-with-lcamtuf-michal-zalewski/
25•ChrisGammell•3d ago•4 comments

Symbolica 2.0: Programmable Symbols for Python and Rust

https://symbolica.io/posts/symbolica_2_0_release/
108•mmastrac•1d ago•10 comments

Tokenomics: Quantifying Where Tokens Are Used in Agentic Software Engineering

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14470
132•Anon84•13h ago•57 comments

Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction

https://github.com/a-yiorgos/wambook
27•nextos•1d ago•4 comments

The best relationships are all-encompassing.

https://andys.blog/the-best-relationships/
11•andytratt•2h ago•3 comments

Netlify CTO Dana Lawson: Writing code is no longer the job

https://thenewstack.io/netlify-agent-experience-engineers/
7•Brajeshwar•32m ago•5 comments

Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/
251•pramodbiligiri•1d ago•165 comments

Biohub releases a world model of protein biology

https://biohub.org/news/world-model-of-protein-biology/
114•gmays•3d ago•17 comments

How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time

https://hyperallergic.com/how-liminalism-became-the-defining-aesthetic-of-our-time/
110•zeech•12h ago•62 comments

Moving beyond fork() + exec()

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1076018/16f01bbbb8e0d1f0/
324•jwilk•1d ago•311 comments

Introducing Boron Buckyballs: Theory that B80 cages can’t be made is disproved

https://cen.acs.org/materials/nanomaterials/buckyballs-boron-buckminster-fullerene-nanomaterials/...
105•crescit_eundo•2d ago•29 comments

Efficient and Training-Free Single-Image Diffusion Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04299
20•yorwba•5h ago•0 comments

Arithmetic Without Numbers – How LLMs Do Math

https://alvaro-videla.com/llm-arithmetic-internals/article_interactive/article.html
59•old_sound•2d ago•16 comments

Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

https://twitter.com/lemire/status/2062880075117113739
309•tosh•1d ago•501 comments

Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/scientists-ejected-from-diabetes-conference-for-distribut...
234•BerislavLopac•4h ago•158 comments