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/

Compression is prediction

https://ngrok.com/blog/compression-is-prediction
373•nikolay•8h ago•145 comments

The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/
65•dcminter•5d ago•5 comments

WorldClaw Agentic 3D open-world generation at scale

https://tencent-hunyuan.github.io/Hunyuan3D-WorldClaw/
168•EwanG•6h ago•52 comments

The lifesaving secret hidden inside a horseshoe crab's blue blood

https://whdh.com/news/the-lifesaving-secret-hidden-inside-a-horseshoe-crabs-blue-blood-and-the-ra...
33•andsoitis•3h ago•5 comments

Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nemotron-lightning-switchyard-rtx-dgx/
197•droidjj•9h ago•105 comments

Mojo 1.0

https://www.modular.com/blog/modular-26-5-mojo-1-0-is-here
336•dayanruben•11h ago•153 comments

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

https://stolen-thoughts.com/
554•quantumgarbage•15h ago•236 comments

The Human Is the Loop

https://brentfitzgerald.com/posts/the-human-is-the-loop/
26•burnto•2h ago•3 comments

OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

https://www.ft.com/content/e49dfb75-f841-4466-a577-f7aaff8779a0
344•ilamont•16h ago•362 comments

Company Offering '100% Human-Written, Never AI' Medical Research Is 100% AI

https://www.404media.co/company-offering-100-human-written-never-ai-peer-review-is-entirely-ai/
76•Anon84•2h ago•16 comments

New Bedford police officer accused of using Flock cameras to track ex-partner

https://newbedfordlight.org/new-bedford-police-officer-accused-of-using-flock-cameras-to-track-an...
104•newsomix9xl•3h ago•56 comments

Neutrinos from Deep Inside Earth Provide a New Picture of the Mantle

https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrinos-from-deep-inside-earth-provide-a-new-picture-of-the-mant...
21•rbanffy•15h ago•1 comments

Grok Bot

https://x.ai/bot
207•rvz•11h ago•172 comments

Making holograms with a pen plotter

https://blog.jordan.matelsky.com/Penplotter-holography/
135•DemiGuru•9h ago•14 comments

Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo

https://photosynthesis.camera
236•sajomes•3d ago•234 comments

Show HN: Tamron Lens Utility Alternative on Linux

https://github.com/yikerman/tamron-lens-control
44•xiaoyu2006•4d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

https://line9.ai/diagram
44•jumpalongjim•5d ago•10 comments

Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

https://developers.googleblog.com/why-go-is-an-ideal-language-for-ai-assisted-software-engineering/
309•0xedb•11h ago•365 comments

Show HN: Find stale, orphaned, deleted-but-retrievable RAG vectors

https://github.com/rimironenko/rag-staleness-check
3•rimironenko•5d ago•0 comments

England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75gk620r22o
503•stevekemp•16h ago•362 comments

Jolt: Clojure compiler implemented with Chez Scheme

https://jolt-lang.github.io
168•mark_l_watson•3d ago•60 comments

London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

https://www.btp.police.uk/news/btp/news/england/btp-expands-live-facial-recognition-lfr-trial-int...
265•BlueBerry2001•19h ago•270 comments

How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story

https://ironicsans.ghost.io/how-we-used-to-get-jobs/
123•speckx•10h ago•98 comments

pg_clickhouse v0.10: Subquery pushdown and 1000x faster TPC-H queries

https://clickhouse.com/blog/pg_clickhouse-whats-new-july-2026
45•saisrirampur•6h ago•3 comments

Nvidia's Risky Business

https://stratechery.com/2026/nvidias-risky-business/
315•jonbaer•18h ago•151 comments

CSS properties you should know for better text designs

https://master.dev/blog/typographic-css-tricks/
95•ibobev•11h ago•9 comments

Manus will return to operating as an independent company

https://manus.im/blog/a-note-to-our-users
145•thm•14h ago•70 comments

Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01828
43•doener•7h ago•18 comments

Show HN: Git-knife – Edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet

https://github.com/TheRealYT/git-knife
144•YonathanTesfaye•13h ago•91 comments

RSI Simulator

https://www.paradigm.xyz/writing/rsi-simulator
36•ckraeuter•11h ago•14 comments