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/

Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2026/06/03/elixir-v1-20-0-released/
481•cloud8421•5h ago•167 comments

Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/introducing-gemma-4-12b/
641•rvz•8h ago•271 comments

I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis

https://burntsushi.net/encephalitis/
454•Tomte•10h ago•129 comments

DaVinci Resolve 21

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/whatsnew
371•pentagrama•9h ago•175 comments

Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/
166•lordleft•6h ago•277 comments

Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/3/uber-caps-usage/
341•pdyc•11h ago•434 comments

Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2026/06/journey-to-jpeg-xl-how-open-source-experiments-shaped-t...
21•ledoge•2h ago•12 comments

Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it

https://blog.nns.ee/2026/06/03/katana-badusb/
635•xx_ns•13h ago•99 comments

Ableton Extensions SDK

https://www.ableton.com/en/live/extensions/
50•bennett_dev•3h ago•20 comments

Gooey: A GPU-accelerated UI framework for Zig

https://github.com/duanebester/gooey
128•ksec•7h ago•40 comments

A Man Who Reads Books for a Living (One Every Two Days)

https://lithub.com/the-man-who-reads-books-for-a-living-one-every-two-days/
61•gmays•4h ago•36 comments

Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/meteor-explodes-over-massachusetts-what-we-know-and-where-it...
22•1970-01-01•2d ago•8 comments

The Ü Programming Language

https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/
3•deterministic•13m ago•0 comments

A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/06/03/pq-certs
213•SGran•9h ago•112 comments

A Mathematician's Lament – Paul Lockhart (2002) [pdf]

https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician%27s_Lament.pdf
19•xeonmc•2h ago•1 comments

ESP32-S31

https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-s31
241•volemo•8h ago•137 comments

Self-hosted dev sandboxes with preview URLs (Docker, Go, no K8s)

https://github.com/tastyeffectco/sandboxes
41•tastyeffectco•4h ago•8 comments

Patching my guitar amp's firmware

https://mforney.org/blog/2026-05-28-patching-my-guitar-amps-firmware.html
18•birdculture•3d ago•0 comments

Stop Killing Games

https://jxself.org/stop-killing-games.shtml
179•amcclure•2d ago•169 comments

Skyvern (YC S23) Is Hiring Open-Source Loving DevRel Engineers

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/skyvern/jobs/1qRTlVx-founding-developer-marketing-open-sour...
1•suchintan•7h ago

Show HN: Mnemo – local-first AI memory layer for any LLM (Rust, SQLite,petgraph)

https://github.com/zaydmulani09/mnemo
22•zaydmulani•3h ago•10 comments

Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

47•shalinshah•6h ago•52 comments

Embryos shape their limbs: a key discovery of "genetic brakes"

https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2026/06/02/how-embryos-shape-their-limbs-a-key-discover...
46•gmays•6h ago•1 comments

Brume is a 24-voice multi-timbral desktop synth for the CM5

https://brume.aftertone.co/
43•oceanwaves•4h ago•17 comments

Rootshell: A new E2EE email service hosted in Iceland

https://rootshell.is
39•sc0rt•5h ago•34 comments

Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

https://www.science.org/content/article/mathematicians-issue-warning-ai-rapidly-gains-ground
157•pseudolus•14h ago•205 comments

PlayStation Architecture

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation/
248•gregsadetsky•13h ago•47 comments

Every Byte Matters

https://fzakaria.com/2026/06/01/every-byte-matters
225•ingve•13h ago•111 comments

Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93x0k194yno
668•reconnecting•11h ago•635 comments

MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/03/macbook-neo-production-doubled-says-kuo/
311•tosh•7h ago•347 comments