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/

Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

https://aisle.com/blog/ai-cybersecurity-after-mythos-the-jagged-frontier
889•dominicq•10h ago•249 comments

The End of Eleventy

https://brennan.day/the-end-of-eleventy/
37•ValentineC•1h ago•18 comments

We spoke to the man making viral Lego-style AI videos for Iran

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjd8jrd1vnyo
28•breve•45m ago•5 comments

How We Broke Top AI Agent Benchmarks: And What Comes Next

https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/trustworthy-benchmarks-cont/
257•Anon84•8h ago•69 comments

Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/08/08/AS-VM.html
158•krackers•6h ago•107 comments

447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

https://zenodo.org/records/19513269
150•iliatoli•7h ago•77 comments

How Complex is my Code?

https://philodev.one/posts/2026-04-code-complexity/
38•speckx•4d ago•4 comments

Pijul a FOSS distributed version control system

https://pijul.org/
92•kouosi•4d ago•13 comments

Dark Castle

https://darkcastle.co.uk/
137•evo_9•7h ago•18 comments

Advanced Mac Substitute is an API-level reimplementation of 1980s-era Mac OS

https://www.v68k.org/advanced-mac-substitute/
207•zdw•11h ago•55 comments

How a dancer with ALS used brainwaves to perform live

https://www.electronicspecifier.com/products/sensors/how-a-dancer-with-als-used-brainwaves-to-per...
5•1659447091•1h ago•1 comments

Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI

https://cirruslabs.org/
239•seekdeep•14h ago•120 comments

How to build a `Git diff` driver

https://www.jvt.me/posts/2026/04/11/how-git-diff-driver/
87•zdw•9h ago•7 comments

Surelock: Deadlock-Free Mutexes for Rust

https://notes.brooklynzelenka.com/Blog/Surelock
185•codetheweb•3d ago•58 comments

The Soul of an Old Machine

https://skalski.dev/the-soul-of-an-old-machine/
32•mskalski•4d ago•7 comments

Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons

389•vidluther•21h ago•222 comments

What is a property?

https://alperenkeles.com/posts/what-is-a-property/
61•alpaylan•4d ago•17 comments

Americans still opt for print books over digital or audio versions

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/09/americans-still-opt-for-print-books-over-digit...
29•thm•1h ago•17 comments

Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy

https://planetscale.com/blog/keeping-a-postgres-queue-healthy
84•tanelpoder•10h ago•21 comments

Building Slogbox

https://alexrios.me/blog/slogbox-devlog/
7•zimpenfish•4d ago•1 comments

Every plane you see in the sky – you can now follow it from the cockpit in 3D

https://flight-viz.com/cockpit.html?lat=40.64&lon=-73.78&alt=3000&hdg=220&spd=130&cs=DAL123
260•coolwulf•3d ago•55 comments

Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager

https://github.com/duguyue100/midnight-captain
16•duguyue100•3h ago•6 comments

Optimal Strategy for Connect 4

https://2swap.github.io/WeakC4/explanation/
268•marvinborner•3d ago•30 comments

The Life and Death of the Book Review

https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/the-life-and-death-of-the-book-review/
20•lermontov•2d ago•4 comments

New synthesis of astronomical measurements shows Hubble tension is real

https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2611/?nocache=true&lang=en
45•anigbrowl•8h ago•6 comments

The APL programming language source code (2012)

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/
49•tosh•9h ago•9 comments

The Problem That Built an Industry

https://ajitem.com/blog/iron-core-part-1-the-problem-that-built-an-industry/
111•ShaggyHotDog•13h ago•37 comments

In Production

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/4/4/absurd-in-production/
6•surprisetalk•4d ago•1 comments

The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

https://aphyr.com/posts/415-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-annoyances
240•aphyr•12h ago•134 comments

Filing the corners off my MacBooks

https://kentwalters.com/posts/corners/
1310•normanvalentine•1d ago•615 comments