[kiwidrew]

Uber really likes hexagons. Their internal name for driver promotions is even "hexcentive"! I've long wondered what compelled Uber to use hexagons to define their various promotion boundaries, because it's not a very user-friendly choice -- the lines on a map look very jagged, for instance.

This post goes some way towards explaining why hexagons:

* "minimize the quantization error introduced when users move through a city"

* "allow us to approximate radiuses easily"

* non-hexagonal regions (such as postal code boundaries) "have unusual shapes and sizes which are not helpful for analysis, and are subject to change"