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/

The bottleneck might be the air in the room

https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/
96•gslin•1h ago•45 comments

Agentic coding notes from Galapagos Island

https://danluu.com/ai-coding/#appendix-agentic-loops-and-writing-this-post
65•gm678•3h ago•21 comments

Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

https://www.wafer.ai/blog/glm52-amd
219•latchkey•10h ago•68 comments

Leanstral 1.5: Proof abundance for all

https://mistral.ai/news/leanstral-1-5/
204•programLyrique•9h ago•46 comments

Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/giant-trees-have-no-trouble-...
183•hhs•9h ago•89 comments

Synthesis is harder than analysis

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/07/03/synthesis-is-harder-than-analysis/
67•azhenley•5h ago•12 comments

Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

https://mirtitles.org
43•clmul•3d ago•19 comments

MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds

https://mrbruh.com/msicenter/
78•MrBruh•7h ago•19 comments

Steam Controller Auto-Charge – pilot to magnetic charging puck using CV

https://github.com/FossPrime/Steam-Controller-Auto-Charge
125•zdw•9h ago•25 comments

SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine

https://github.com/searxng/searxng
202•theanonymousone•11h ago•52 comments

FreeBSD ate my RAM

https://crocidb.com/post/freebsd-ate-my-ram/
130•theanonymousone•12h ago•45 comments

The firefighting system of the Van der Heyden brothers in 17th century Amsterdam

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-amsterdam-invented-the-fire-department/
81•zdw•9h ago•14 comments

Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/
127•stock_toaster•8h ago•165 comments

Jamesob's guide to running SOTA LLMs locally

https://github.com/jamesob/local-llm
333•livestyle•17h ago•150 comments

Soatok's Informal Guide to Threat Models

https://soatok.blog/2026/06/30/soatoks-informal-guide-to-threat-models/
75•zdw•7h ago•9 comments

David Beazley – Programming Courses

https://www.dabeaz.com/courses.html
58•gregsadetsky•2h ago•19 comments

Show HN: Classify mechanical faults using Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining

https://github.com/adam-s/car-diagnosis
11•dataviz1000•2d ago•0 comments

New serious vulnerabilities spiked around release of Claude Mythos Preview

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/cve-severity-spike
92•cubefox•10h ago•31 comments

Applied Category Theory Course (2018)

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/act_course/index.html
102•measurablefunc•11h ago•7 comments

Maybe you should learn something

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_135_learn/
41•tylerdane•4h ago•21 comments

Godot bans "vibe-coded" code contributions

https://theguptalog.blogspot.com/2026/07/godot-bans-ai-generated-code.html
4•guptalog•1h ago•2 comments

Costco is the anti-Amazon

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-anti-amazon/
391•bookofjoe•16h ago•366 comments

Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web

https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/gone-but-not-forgotten-recovering-the-dead-web/
61•wslh•3d ago•16 comments

Espionage Against the European Parliament

https://citizenlab.ca/research/member-of-committee-investigating-spyware-hacked-with-pegasus/
350•ledoge•11h ago•86 comments

Reverse-engineering Codemasters' BIGF archive format in Ruby

https://davidslv.uk/2026/06/30/reading-binary-in-ruby.html
12•davidslv•3d ago•3 comments

Infracost (YC W21) Is Hiring a Marketing Lead to Shift FinOps Left

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/infracost/jobs/YTJcFwr-marketing-lead
1•akh•11h ago

Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL bug with TLA+

https://ubuntu.com/blog/hunting-a-16-year-old-sqlite-bug-with-tla-is-dqlite-affected
201•peterparker204•3d ago•22 comments

Factories are just rooms

https://interconnected.org/home/2026/07/03/factories
232•arbesman•16h ago•95 comments

Show HN: A statically typed, cross-platform, easily bootstrappable build system

https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY/
31•Rochus•3d ago•11 comments

Study reveals what people see when they read lips

https://news.ku.edu/news/article/study-reveals-what-people-really-see-when-they-read-lips
6•giuliomagnifico•3d ago•0 comments