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/

Knuth Reward Check

https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check
62•Curiositry•2h ago•24 comments

Grieving the Loss of Details

https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/grieving-the-loss-of-details/
166•signa11•4d ago•107 comments

Talorys – A self-hosted personal AI agent on Cloudflare's free tier

https://github.com/rociiu/talorys
176•rociiu•7h ago•93 comments

OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller

https://openscad.org/
22•b-man•3d ago•20 comments

Rampart: Browser native on-device PII radaction

https://ndstudio.gov/posts/say-hello-to-rampart
45•nateb2022•1d ago•14 comments

Mxc: Microsoft Execution Containers version 1.0.0

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/10/07/microsoft-execution-containers-policy-drive...
94•smokel•1d ago•15 comments

Weave (YC W25) is hiring ML, AI, product, & design engineers

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/workweave
1•adchurch•25m ago

Bitwarden Dual License Model

https://community.bitwarden.com/t/published-version-update-in-app-stores/102750
237•Cider9986•4h ago•174 comments

REA Reverse – Engineer Anything

https://rea.tools/
619•modinfo•18h ago•268 comments

Telegram Desktop vulnerability allowed any user's file to be stolen

https://beaksec.github.io/posts/telegram-desktop-one-click-account-takeover/
347•g-b-r•15h ago•173 comments

I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall

https://conversableeconomist.com/2026/09/28/i-would-like-the-value-of-my-home-to-rise-while-my-pr...
129•colinprince•5h ago•273 comments

Triple-A Minesweeper

https://minesweeper.mikelacher.com/
1271•robin_reala•1d ago•255 comments

Anthropic discloses 2 months old fake tip to police among new rogue AI incidents

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/anthropic-ai-model-submits-false-homicide-tip-police-website-202...
15•guessmyname•30m ago•0 comments

PVX-001: open-source Covid-19 vaccine starts Phase 1 trial

https://chronicles.popvax.com/p/popvax-goes-clinical
63•jajoosam•3h ago•15 comments

FDA may allow some toxic chemicals to be added to food without safety review

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/10/fda-toxic-chemicals-food-analysis
86•NewJazz•3h ago•43 comments

`123456' password used in Danish CPR data breach

https://cphpost.dk/2026-10-10/news/round-up/123456-password-used-in-massive-danish-cpr-data-breach/
339•baal80spam•8h ago•178 comments

Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection (2024)

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/zhang-qibo
266•ortusdux•2d ago•62 comments

Chernobyl particles reveal unexpectedly stable nuclear fuel after 40 years

https://phys.org/news/2026-10-chernobyl-particles-reveal-unexpectedly-stable.html
97•geox•3d ago•33 comments

AI Is Throwing a Roadside Picnic

https://metedata.substack.com/p/ai-is-throwing-a-roadside-picnic
37•young_mete•2h ago•39 comments

WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload

https://tonym.us/wsl2-vs-wsl3-benchmarks.html
201•tonymet•2d ago•173 comments

Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry

https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/
170•john_alan•7h ago•167 comments

Whooping Cranes Learned to Migrate by Following Costumed Pilots

https://theverifiedpost.com/article/whooping-cranes-ultralight-costumed-pilots-operation-migration
24•kgolubic•1d ago•1 comments

Can you use autoregressive diffusion to generate market data?

https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-use-autoregressive-diffusion-to-generate-market-data/
160•jsomers•1d ago•48 comments

Noto means "no tofu": fixing dotted circles in Myanmar text

https://www.datocms.com/blog/handling-less-common-scripts
46•steffoz•4d ago•26 comments

Tom Brown used GOP ties to broker a $1.25B/month SpaceX compute deal

https://wsj.com/tech/ai/tom-brown-athropic-669005ad
84•utiiiD•3h ago•24 comments

Cloudflare acquires Deno

https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare
1322•ilreb•1d ago•679 comments

Show HN: Carrier-Explode: iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy carrier settings decoded

https://carrierexplode.com/
390•simplyalec•1d ago•46 comments

Compiling Rust to readable C with Eurydice

https://lwn.net/Articles/1055211/
124•peter_d_sherman•19h ago•34 comments

Clinical trial of a prion disease drug candidate begins enrolling participants

https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/clinical-trial-prion-disease-drug-candidate-begins-enrolling-...
147•luu•18h ago•39 comments

What mathematicians should know about the Lean Theorem Prover: reliability & AI

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/09/what-mathematicians-should-know-about-the-lean-theorem-...
178•matt_d•1d ago•50 comments