The pie chart on the left double counts everything. The total is represented as a slice in the pie chart.

Probably a case of automatically converting an Excel column into a pie chart.

That's what came to mind. And they simply selected a pie chart instead of a bar chart, and it wasn't super wrong because they were trying to show subcomponents of a larger value.

Meh. Not worth the HN thread. It's like picking apart why someone wrote code in a suboptimal/messy way when in reality they just wanted to get something done under a constraint, and the author would totally agree if they were here to defend themselves.

Yet here are people saying the author can never be taken seriously because of it.

I didn't think anything of it at first but that is indeed a strange design. Especially since the right part is a breakdown of one of the pieces.