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/

How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

https://performance.dev/how-is-linear-so-fast-a-technical-breakdown
143•howToTestFE•2h ago•77 comments

Building from Zero After Addiction, Prison, and a Felony

https://gavinray97.github.io/blog/building-from-zero-after-addiction-prison-felony
122•gavinray•2h ago•23 comments

The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aei2409
12•Anon84•35m ago•8 comments

Making Peace with Your Unlived Dreams

https://nik.art/making-peace-with-your-unlived-dreams/
69•herbertl•2h ago•26 comments

Powering up a module from the IBM 604: an electronic calculator from 1948

https://www.righto.com/2026/06/ibm-604-thyraton-tube-module.html
54•elpocko•3h ago•16 comments

Silurus/ooxml: Pixel-faithful Office documents, rendered in the browser

https://github.com/yukiyokotani/office-open-xml-viewer
69•maxloh•3h ago•26 comments

What is the purpose of the lost+found folder in Linux and Unix? (2014)

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/18154/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-lostfound-folder-in-lin...
81•tosh•2d ago•32 comments

My automated doubt development process

https://www.alexself.dev/blog/automated-doubt
23•aself101•2h ago•10 comments

Cloning a Sennheiser BA2015 battery pack

https://blog.brixit.nl/cloning-a-sennheiser-ba2015-accu-pack/
82•zdw•1d ago•14 comments

Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs?

https://blog.ydb.tech/do-we-fear-the-serializable-isolation-level-more-than-we-fear-subtle-bugs-5...
5•b-man•4d ago•0 comments

Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics

https://www.lms.ac.uk/news/leiden-declaration-on-ai-and-mathematics
38•_____k•2h ago•1 comments

The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners

https://www.ioccc.org/2025/
344•matt_d•15h ago•82 comments

The complete IPv4 address space, mapped

https://worldip.io/
14•theanonymousone•2h ago•6 comments

Proliferate (YC S25) is hiring to building open source Codex

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/proliferate/jobs/L3copvK-founding-engineer
1•pablo24602•4h ago

Backrest – a web UI and orchestrator for restic backup

https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest
55•flexagoon•5d ago•3 comments

Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe
187•devenjarvis•9h ago•38 comments

A visual introduction to kernel functions

https://kelvinpaschal.com/blog/kernel-functions/
14•Kelvinidan•2d ago•0 comments

If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31514
7•ketchup32613•2h ago•0 comments

Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/65697
381•predkambrij•7h ago•212 comments

Podman 6: machine usability improvements (2025)

https://blog.podman.io/2025/10/podman-6-machine-usability-improvements/
79•daesorin•7h ago•5 comments

Win16 Memory Management

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/win16-memory-management/
124•supermatou•2d ago•60 comments

sqlite: A CGo-free port of SQLite/SQLite3

https://gitlab.com/cznic/sqlite
30•tosh•7h ago•20 comments

You'll never guess who made the first wireless telephone

https://signoregalilei.com/2026/05/31/youll-never-guess-who-made-the-first-wireless-telephone/
44•surprisetalk•3d ago•8 comments

Public Domain Image Archive

https://pdimagearchive.org/
229•davidbarker•20h ago•32 comments

The Secret Life of Circuits with lcamtuf / Michał Zalewski (Audio Interview)

https://theamphour.com/725-the-secret-life-of-circuits-with-lcamtuf-michal-zalewski/
57•ChrisGammell•3d ago•5 comments

There's no escaping it: an exploration of ANSI codes

https://blog.safia.rocks/2025/12/22/ansi-codes/
24•ankitg12•2d ago•7 comments

The curious case of low-protein diets

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/low-protein-diet-animals-live-longer
31•curmudgeon22•2h ago•11 comments

Speculative KV coding: losslessly compressing KV cache by up to ~4×

https://fergusfinn.com/blog/kv-entropy-coder/
134•kkm•3d ago•28 comments

Show HN: Kyushu – A self-hostable WASM sandbox for JavaScript workers

https://kyushu.dev/
68•le_chuck•13h ago•26 comments

Symbolica 2.0: Programmable Symbols for Python and Rust

https://symbolica.io/posts/symbolica_2_0_release/
141•mmastrac•2d ago•13 comments