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/

πFS

https://github.com/philipl/pifs
284•helterskelter•3h ago•77 comments

How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science

https://spectrum.ieee.org/curiosity-rover-jpl-mars-science
125•pseudolus•4h ago•20 comments

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [pdf] (1974)

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf
36•shadow28•1h ago•26 comments

I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

453•eries•7h ago•375 comments

Organic foods are not healthier or pesticide free

https://news.immunologic.org/p/organic-foods-are-not-healthieror
30•fsflover•46m ago•31 comments

PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you

https://pgdog.dev/blog/our-funding-announcement
346•levkk•8h ago•172 comments

L'Affaire Siloxane

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane
106•idlewords•1d ago•18 comments

GeoLibre 1.0

https://geolibre.app/
91•jonbaer•4h ago•6 comments

Farmer donates land for a park, city sells it for $10M as data center land

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/farmer-donates-land-for-a-park-city-sells-it-for-data-...
232•maxloh•3h ago•62 comments

Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor

https://media.mercedes-benz.com/en/article/bebac2af-acdc-465a-9538-adb0bf3d8ccf
486•raffael_de•14h ago•302 comments

Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

https://www.extend.ai/ui
93•kbyatnal•6h ago•18 comments

Show HN: HelixDB – A graph database built on object storage

https://github.com/HelixDB/helix-db/tree/main
75•GeorgeCurtis•6h ago•29 comments

Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
926•edent•9h ago•423 comments

Authentication issues related to API requests

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/fcj3088jg1wx
147•Multicomp•6h ago•27 comments

Anthropic's Model Naming, Extrapolated

https://samwilkinson.io/posts/2026-06-09-anthropics-model-naming-extrapolated
231•sammycdubs•3h ago•63 comments

Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/29045
283•tonyrice•5h ago•196 comments

Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications

https://burr.apache.org/
152•anhldbk•7h ago•84 comments

Raspberry Pi 5 – 16 GB, $350

https://www.adafruit.com/product/6125?src=raspberrypi
96•akman•2h ago•111 comments

Show HN: Atlasphere – Live Infrastructure Diagrams

15•andreygrehov•1d ago•4 comments

Show HN: Artie – Real-time data replication to your warehouse, now self-serve

https://www.artie.com
16•tang8330•16h ago•5 comments

All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)

https://jivx.com/eki
173•momentmaker•10h ago•60 comments

Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster

https://www.inverse.com/input/gaming/the-dirty-secret-that-makes-speedrunning-on-spongebob-a-lot-...
56•pncnmnp•19h ago•33 comments

Pick and Place: Carbon Nanotube Nanoassembly Process

https://www.c12qe.com/news/pick-and-place-carbon-nanotube-quantum-chip-manufacturing
15•bpierre•2d ago•3 comments

A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent

https://blue41.com/blog/how-we-helped-bunq-secure-their-financial-ai-assistant/
151•tvissers•8h ago•131 comments

DiffusionGemma: 4x Faster Text Generation

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/diffusion-gemma-faster-text-gen...
247•meetpateltech•6h ago•62 comments

The Abundance Illusion

https://www.carlyle.com/carlyle-compass/the-abundance-illusion
57•cwal37•2h ago•26 comments

'They take you out of life, out of time': a journey into Spain's cave paintings

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/02/journey-into-spain-palaeolithic-cave-paintings-al...
60•NaOH•2d ago•25 comments

Who Runs Your Rust Future? Hands-On Intro to Async Rust

https://aibodh.com/posts/async-rust-chapter-1-hands-on-intro-to-async-rust/
91•febin•2d ago•20 comments

Meta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/04/meta-steals-a-tactic-from-tesla-and-builds-data-centers-in-tents/
82•gnabgib•4h ago•89 comments

Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway

https://sbbresale.ch/
162•kisamoto•2d ago•91 comments