I love that they make their traffic numbers available. I have been using ddg and graphing/predicting the next days traffic since March here: https://qunc.co/ddg.
Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.
I don't want to hijack or anything, but just want to also link to a project I did that also looked at these ads and lets you browse/categorize them interactively: https://qunc.co/russia_facebook_project/
Some stats about the data set:
There were 3,419 ads.
They had approximately 40 million impressions.
Approximately 3.7 million clicks.
And, surprisingly to me, cost only around 117,000 USD in total
I remember 10 years ago Nuance used legal threats to eliminate competition in this field, to the extent that greatly discouraged any startup speech recognition companies.
Google was able to get around it, just because they became heavier..
This is my thought as well. So you fit a curve to a sorted list of each employees sick time. Does this give you any additional insight? So it follows a log function. Does that mean anything?
If you do a histogram and fit a function you get something that could conceivably be interpreted as a probability distribution function, you might be able to say something about predicting the sick time a given employee will take and the uncertainty of your prediction.
But I honestly don't see what visualizing the data in the method of the post, or fitting a function to it contributes. Hope that doesn't violate the new no negativity policy of HN.
Wow, the extensive comment section is eye-opening to me, in how little consensus there exists about the validity of models, line-fitting, and prediction.
Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.