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H3: Tiling the Earth with Hexagons

Uber Engineering · talk · Watch on YouTube

Databases & storageData visualization & information designAlgorithms & data structures

What it is

Uber Engineering's Joseph Gilley explains why Uber uses hexagons for geospatial indexing and introduces H3, its open source hierarchical grid system. He covers use cases and how distortion is handled.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN points to it as the detailed explanation of why hexagons suit map grids, in threads about H3.

  • 1 people recommended it
  • 1 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2018, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “They go into a lot of the details later on the same video.”

    Details why hexagons suit map grids and how distortion is handled

    mtrovo, 2019-07 · Recommendation · in “H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index (2018)”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: h3, hexagonal grid, uber, spatial index, maps

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