H3 geospatial indexing system
Hacker ApprovedGeospatial indexing library in Developer tools
Hexagonal spatial index valued for uniform cells, distribution across nodes and fast binning; critics note non-congruent hexagons cause overlaps and gaps across mixed resolutions.
Hexagonal spatial index valued for uniform cells, distribution across nodes and fast binning; critics note non-congruent hexagons cause overlaps and gaps across mixed resolutions.
22 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 18
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 82%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 18 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 4.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Uniform cells with low distortion
“H3 is preferred for geo analytics because it produces a more uniform spatial index with low distortion and consistent distances between cells”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “the distortion across the globe is much less, because of the way H3 creates its grid”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 on Hacker News Fast binning and approximate joins
“as long as you're OK with approximation, you can speed up a lot of things by working with CellID instead of actual geometries”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “with H3 you just compute the bin, O(1) instead of O(log n)”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes” Easy joins without geometry work
“the big selling point of H3 is that once you're "in the H3 system", many operations don't need to worry about geometry at all”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes” “As long as you agree on zoom level, joining two datasets with S2 and H3 is really easy.”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes” Easy to distribute across nodes
“H3 works reasonably for sharding spatial joins if all of the cell resolutions have the same size”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes” “h3 is effectively a grid so can easily be distributed over nodes”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Non-congruent hexagons create overlaps and gaps
“the lack of congruency in H3 hexagons can cause weird overlaps and gaps if you plot mixed resolutions naively”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes” “H3 is not congruent it was optimized for visualization”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes” Loses accuracy through approximation
“Yes it speeds things up but you loose accuracy.”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes” “a much higher cell fidelity (below 1cm compared to 1m for H3)”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 on Hacker News Poor scalability for analytical computations
“The main disadvantage of non-congruent tiling systems like H3 is poor scalability and performance when running analytical computations.”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “H3 has fixed overhead (~4.7KB/109 allocs for k=2 ring), while fallback scales linearly.”
Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes”
What people said
25 of the 26 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“H3, on the other hand, is phenomenal”
“conditioning makes a big difference over prompting for complex actions”
“My own H3 test show that H3 (API edition) is undoubtedly better than LTX in prompt adherence”
“For h3 is can be a looser area and you may find lots of your points are clustered in a few grids”
“As long as you agree on zoom level, joining two datasets with S2 and H3 is really easy.”
“Yes it speeds things up but you loose accuracy.”
“H3 works reasonably for sharding spatial joins if all of the cell resolutions have the same size”
“Doesn’t meet all our product requirements unfortunately.”
“with H3 you just compute the bin, O(1) instead of O(log n)”
“h3 is effectively a grid so can easily be distributed over nodes”
“H3 has fixed overhead (~4.7KB/109 allocs for k=2 ring), while fallback scales linearly.”
“the big selling point of H3 is that once you're "in the H3 system", many operations don't need to worry about geometry at all”
“the lack of congruency in H3 hexagons can cause weird overlaps and gaps if you plot mixed resolutions naively”
“H3 is not congruent it was optimized for visualization”
“it definitely beats zipcodes”
“The sheer number of companies and hobbyists using H3 for analytics across a wide spectrum makes it much more attractive than S2.”
“h3 is a better fit for flow modeling - stuff like telematics”
“The main disadvantage of non-congruent tiling systems like H3 is poor scalability and performance when running analytical computations.”
“H3 is preferred for geo analytics because it produces a more uniform spatial index with low distortion and consistent distances between cells”
“the distortion across the globe is much less, because of the way H3 creates its grid”
“you can get some good results”
“as long as you're OK with approximation, you can speed up a lot of things by working with CellID instead of actual geometries”
“Since they align with an unique hex, I can ensure that one cell grid aligns and is placed on the same place in the world”
“subdivisions of a cell leak into the neighbouring cells”
“a much higher cell fidelity (below 1cm compared to 1m for H3)”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.