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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating info, and great visualization!

An interesting discontinuity that jumps out to me is that AR dropped 54%, but neighboring LA and MS dropped 0%. AR was in totality, but LA and MS were close.

Part of it is probably related to the distribution of population vs the path of totality. Similarly, VT dropped more than double what neighbor NY did, but VT's population is mostly in Burlington (totality) whereas NY's is in NYC (not totality and not so mobile).

But 54% to 0% seems too dramatic a difference for that to be the full explanation. Any insights? Maybe just inadequate data to calculate?

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Hey there. I can provide some more details. Our data doesn't show as much of a drop in Mississippi compared to Arkansas. However, in cases where traffic is higher than usual during the day (as it was in Mississippi and Louisiana), the drop compared with the previous week is even less noticeable using this method.

Interesting, I was wondering about that too -- so are the "0% drop" states sometimes actually "non-zero % increase" states?

I think there’s only one or two states where that happens. If you check the table, I use “—“ instead of 0%.

"Close" on a cloudy day (which it was for most of LA and MS)? Not a lot to see, especially when you're all still at work and there's a live stream from NASA of a variety of locations - and you're watching it.

Whereas a huge proportion of Arkansas' population was in totality (and presumably watching outside). About the only larger place that didn't experience it was the Fayetteville-Bentonville corridor.

In my country, the largest internet provider had intermitent service interruptions for a couple hours ADSL and mobile. They were approximately 1 minute every two minutes. Even 3g failed a couple times.

Such interruptions happen a couple times a year, only. Coincidence % would be 2(100)/(365)

We had a 20% eclipse so, it was a regular working day. I would rule out increased usage)

Louisiana was pretty smothered by clouds during eclipse time yesterday which likely had an impact.

Totality is a much bigger deal.

Near totality is cool, but it's not the same couple of minutes of magic.

Agreed, but the other neighboring, non-totality, states, do not show the same discontinuity in data.

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