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•11mo ago

Comments

buildsjets•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
(2003)
throw0101b•11mo 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•11mo ago
Are there any public, open, comprehensive datasets on flights?
dieselerator•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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/

Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era

https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
387•Ryan5453•2h ago•144 comments

System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]

https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a10affd749724787c8913a2ae0841.pdf
259•be7a•1h ago•162 comments

Assessing Claude Mythos Preview's cybersecurity capabilities

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/
145•sweis•2h ago•16 comments

GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.1
278•zixuanlimit•3h ago•89 comments

S3 Files and the changing face of S3

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/04/s3-files-and-the-changing-face-of-s3.html
31•werner•33m ago•6 comments

Cambodia unveils a statue of famous landmine-sniffing rat Magawa

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rx7xzd10xo
157•speckx•2h ago•31 comments

Show HN: Gemma 4 Multimodal Fine-Tuner for Apple Silicon

https://github.com/mattmireles/gemma-tuner-multimodal
23•MediaSquirrel•40m ago•2 comments

A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-truck-drive-spent-20-years-making-this-astonishing-sc...
101•1659447091•1d ago•14 comments

Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)

https://sam-burns.com/posts/concrete-laptop-stand/
625•sam-bee•9h ago•198 comments

Rescuing old printers with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP

https://printervention.app/details
94•gmac•3h ago•31 comments

Cloudflare targets 2029 for full post-quantum security

https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-roadmap/
201•ilreb•6h ago•65 comments

Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

https://rajnandan.com/posts/taste-in-the-age-of-ai-and-llms/
166•speckx•4h ago•150 comments

AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html
73•evakhoury•1d ago•20 comments

Google open-sources experimental agent orchestration testbed Scion

https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/04/google-agent-testbed-scion/
101•timbilt•6h ago•30 comments

Cells for NetBSD: kernel-enforced, jail-like isolation

https://netbsd-cells.petermann-digital.de/
5•akagusu•23m ago•1 comments

We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code

https://www.juxt.pro/blog/a-bug-on-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/
344•henrygarner•9h ago•174 comments

The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-image-boards-of-hayao-miyazaki
21•vinhnx•1d ago•4 comments

John Coltrane Illustrates the Mathematics of Jazz

https://www.americanjazzmusicsociety.com/blog/john-coltrane-draws
62•luu•14h ago•4 comments

9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring – Lead Robotics and More

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/9-mothers?utm_source=x8pZ4B3P3Q
1•ukd1•6h ago

A new Postcrossing stamp from the USA

https://www.postcrossing.com/blog/2026/03/31/a-new-postcrossing-stamp-from-the-usa
57•Tomte•4d ago•17 comments

How a blind man made it possible for others with low vision to build Lego sets

https://apnews.com/article/lego-bricks-for-blind-audio-braille-instructions-5a2a27de4354a0b144317...
8•speckx•5h ago•2 comments

Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR

https://blog.zacka.io/p/simplify-then-add-lightness-bc4
82•rryan•5h ago•22 comments

Boneyard: Generate pixel-perfect skeleton screens from your real DOM

https://github.com/0xGF/boneyard
8•steveharing1•4d ago•3 comments

Emotion Concepts and Their Function in a Large Language Model

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html
42•Anon84•3d ago•4 comments

12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-orange-peel-produced-something-nobody-im...
212•pulisse•4h ago•76 comments

Dropping Cloudflare for Bunny.net

https://jola.dev/posts/dropping-cloudflare
335•shintoist•6h ago•179 comments

Every GPU That Mattered

https://sheets.works/data-viz/every-gpu
286•jonbaer•11h ago•164 comments

US labor force participation continues to slide

https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/restaurant-economic-insights/analysis-commenta...
41•toomuchtodo•1h ago•11 comments

Show HN: A cartographer's attempt to realistically map Tolkien's world

https://www.intofarlands.com/atlasofarda
137•intofarlands•8h ago•25 comments

SQLite in Production: Lessons from Running a Store on a Single File

https://ultrathink.art/blog/sqlite-in-production-lessons
156•thunderbong•3d ago•100 comments