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/

Claude: System Prompts

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts
239•tosh•3h ago•123 comments

The AI Credit Resale Economy

https://vectoral.com/blog/who-are-the-token-brokers
79•mlenhard•1h ago•24 comments

St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core

https://www.wptv.com/news/treasure-coast/region-st-lucie-county/saint-lucie-nuclear-power-plant-u...
31•toomuchtodo•1h ago•15 comments

Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-ads-firefox-ios
217•pentagrama•3h ago•85 comments

A True Telnet BBS on a Casio Calculator

https://ei3lh.eu/2026/08/16/a-true-telnet-bbs-on-a-casio-calculator/
37•austinallegro•4h ago•6 comments

The weekend is 100 years old

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/aug/16/the-weekend-is-100-years-old-skiveday-fridays-and-h...
33•lentil_soup•1h ago•8 comments

Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users

https://wildstatic.com/
25•adjohu•3h ago•15 comments

GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/gps-and-the-lost-art-of-getting-lost
11•karakoram•1h ago•7 comments

Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga

https://nnamgreb.de/blog/Clamiga+-+Common+Lisp+for+the+Amiga
11•emptybits•3d ago•0 comments

A SAT Attack on Tarski's High School Algebra Problem

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08421
46•matt_d•4d ago•16 comments

Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kidney+disappointment%22
197•Alifatisk•4h ago•79 comments

Tasklet (YC P26) Is Hiring a Head of Design Engineering

https://tasklet.ai/careers/head-of-design-engineering
1•mayop100•3h ago

Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?

https://brandur.org/fragments/postgres-without-pgbouncer
95•abelanger•3d ago•53 comments

Chestnut – eGPU dock with open-source firmware

https://hwbusters.com/news/comma-ai-egpu-dock-runs-open-source-firmware-249-bare-799-with-an-rx-9...
93•txrx0000•2d ago•24 comments

Asus Bike Booster

https://www.asus.com/accessories/bike-booster/asus-oxiis/oxiis-intelligent-bike-booster/
547•wiradikusuma•4d ago•380 comments

Superconducting monolayer cuprate with a single CuO2 plane

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10857-1
45•sbulaev•3d ago•12 comments

Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work

https://duckdb.org/2026/07/31/asynchronous-io
238•pdet•6d ago•27 comments

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

https://rhonabwy.com/2026/08/15/software-engineering-fundamentals-matter-more-than-ever/
259•ingve•18h ago•163 comments

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas
233•felixbraun•19h ago•57 comments

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/super-el-nino-growth-accelerating-to-record-strength-f...
363•dgellow•21h ago•248 comments

What I Learned Securing Sniffnet with the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund

https://sniffnet.app/news/github-secure-open-source-fund/
12•dmit•2d ago•2 comments

A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4335-1.html
49•thunderbong•3h ago•36 comments

Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns (2018)

https://tinkerings.org/2018/03/28/guiding-ships-with-moire-patterns/
94•Eridanus2•15h ago•22 comments

Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dad2.70432
456•randycupertino•1d ago•355 comments

At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-first-at-home-test-for-infected-ticks-could-improve...
284•gmays•1d ago•107 comments

Falstad Math and Physics Simulations

https://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html
54•pykello•12h ago•11 comments

Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

https://www.anthropic.com/research/multiagent-systems
164•maxutility•14h ago•114 comments

AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-discovery-doing-really
170•AnodicElegy•21h ago•84 comments

A fortuitous decade as an indie software developer

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/8/3.html
136•frizlab•6d ago•19 comments

AI Coding Without the Vibes

https://peterbloem.nl/blog/craft-coding
21•riskone•6h ago•5 comments