Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust

#41

Post by zX41ZdbW » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

grim7reaper wrote: post #20

zX41ZdbW wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H3 was integrated into ClickHouse in 2019, and since then, I have heard many interesting stories. There are unusual ones, e.g., when it is used not to map data on Earth, but for astronomy (stars, galaxies).

I'm curious about those interesting stories ^^ Care to share a bit more?

Most likely this one: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb292/...

Re: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust

#42

Post by kj4211cash » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 3:46 AM UTC

websiteapi wrote: post #7

who is using uber h3 and what for? (besides uber of course)

we have used it at my last 2 companies for most geospatial data analyses. defining and visualizing catchment areas. making maps dividing up service areas. picking out high demand density areas. etc. before h3, both companies were using zipcodes and more ad-hoc data transformations. i'm not saying h3 is perfect. i wouldn't know. but it definitely beats zipcodes.

Re: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust

#43

Post by jandrewrogers » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 4:47 AM UTC

pheelicks wrote: post #35

jandrewrogers wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main advantage of hexagonal spherical tiling systems is that they are roughly equal area at a given resolution. This makes them particularly suitable for generating visualizable aggregates when you primarily care about spatial distribution rather than specific boundaries (like borders). The main disadvantage of non-congruent tiling systems like H3 is poor scalability and performance when running analytical comput…

It is a common misconception that h3 is equal area. At any resolution level the cell size varies by a factor of 2, which is (roughly) the same as S2. See the following visualizations for an illustration: https://a5geo.org/examples/area https://a5geo.org/examples/airbnb

Note that I wrote “roughly equal area”. True equal area doesn’t exist. I am on record that for analytical purposes, equal area largely doesn’t matter.