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Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-38-27b/
286•bilsbie•6h ago•121 comments

The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]

https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/vinton_report_5.pdf
161•ronbenton•6h ago•69 comments

AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64

https://meanhamster.com/news/agi-64-brings-sierra-adventures-to-the-commodore-64
57•erickhill•4h ago•8 comments

A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/
447•Narishma•13h ago•233 comments

Claude: System Prompts

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts
613•tosh•17h ago•248 comments

Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

https://reticulum.network/
78•sudo_cowsay•6h ago•17 comments

Rhombus 1.1 is now available

https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html
52•spdegabrielle•5h ago•18 comments

Low-Tech Ceramic Water Filter

https://wiki.lowtechlab.org/wiki/Filtre_%C3%A0_eau_c%C3%A9ramique/en
151•Bluestein•5d ago•38 comments

Applying a photosynthetic process to treat “dry eye”

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/taking-tip-plants-eyes
35•gumby•5h ago•2 comments

Interview with Amit Patel, Creator of “Solar Realms Elite” (2013)

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/02/18/amit-patel-creator-of-solar-realms-elite/
45•bananaboy•1w ago•9 comments

How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/256212140/how-do-i-permanently-disable-google-photos-pop...
76•dt3ft•3d ago•39 comments

SIMD in the 90s: Programming Intel's Pentium MMX

https://pikuma.com/blog/programming-intel-pentium-mmx-simd
104•ibobev•3d ago•42 comments

Strong gravitational lensing and microlensing of supernovae (2024)

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/644cad8a-6c9b-4b02-bcf3-b8b6e8c614c5
8•andsoitis•3h ago•0 comments

Dancing with friends and enemies: boids' swarm intelligence (2012)

https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/122095
38•surprisetalk•5d ago•3 comments

$12B of US ratepayers' money wasted on a modeling mistake in PJM

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/12b-of-us-ratepayers-money-wasted
12•_delirium•1h ago•2 comments

The AI Credit Resale Economy

https://vectoral.com/blog/who-are-the-token-brokers
264•mlenhard•15h ago•108 comments

Show HN: Vocal Slice – Cut audio by selecting text, fully on-device

https://vocalslice.com/
11•terranivium•6d ago•5 comments

Design 3D-printable parts by talking

https://nurb.dev/
3•mkmk•2d ago•0 comments

MathCode, Mathematical Coding Agent

https://math-ai-org.github.io/mathcode/
83•homarp•12h ago•26 comments

Protobuf has LSP support. You're welcome

https://buf.build/blog/protobuf-lsp
138•theanonymousone•11h ago•91 comments

Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/16/stripe-will-reportedly-acquire-ai-gateway-startup-openrouter-fo...
284•zacharyozer•10h ago•194 comments

Red queen hypothesis – A new way forward for self-improving AI

https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/red-queen-hypothesis-new-way-forward-self-improving-ai
38•hardlianotion•10h ago•5 comments

Prolly: A content-addressed ordered map built on prolly trees

https://github.com/crabbuild/prolly
24•forhappy•5h ago•0 comments

Plastic mechanical computer from 1963: The Digi-Comp 1 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y8bGBE71yw
62•tobr•1d ago•16 comments

Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga

https://nnamgreb.de/blog/Clamiga+-+Common+Lisp+for+the+Amiga
104•emptybits•4d ago•13 comments

Nvidia dramatically reduces amount of OpenAI infra financing it may guarantee

https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidia-scales-back-250-billion-openai-data-center-guarantee-wsj-...
184•root-parent•9h ago•84 comments

Anton Chekhov played at love most of his life

https://commonreader.wustl.edu/winning-and-losing-at-the-great-game-of-intimacy/
83•lermontov•2d ago•22 comments

Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-ads-firefox-ios
617•pentagrama•17h ago•251 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...
182•toomuchtodo•15h ago•133 comments

Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers

402•stagas•12h ago•106 comments
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/