> the same kind of bias
> another willful misrepresentation
These phrases, as well as the whole last paragraph, contribute no meritorical value to the comment, but are aggresively vocal about assuming bad faith and as such violate HN guidelines. Please don't do that.
The problem is what you are measuring. If you have to compress a 100MB file, and algorithm A/B/C/D compress it to 10/9/1/0.9MB, respectively, then we can argue that "B is 10% better than A" (because the file is 10% smaller) and also "D is 10% better than C" (same).
However, moving from A to B saves us 1MB for this file. Moving from C to D only saves us 0.1MB. So depending on how you look at it, you could also argue that the difference between C and D is really only 0.1% (of the original file size). It may not be what you want (for a particular situation), but it's not wrong.
I could also call that a wilful misrepresentation, since gzip level 9 is very slow compared to the default setting and IMO isn't worth the extra execution time.
Also, nobody mentions that gzip is already installed everywhere. zstd is fairly new, and it's not installed by default on any of the machines I use.
I mean, I'm sure there are some exotic screw drivers that work better than Torx. But I can get Torx screws and drivers in every hardware store and everyone already has compatible bits so why not use whatever works?
You could have demonstrated the math without your attacks.
This makes no sense. It's 9% better because it's 9% better.