But it's downright misleading to show the vertical axis from something other than 0.0 to 1.0 when comparing ratios. They start it at 0.2. In reality, LZJB is saving 50% of the space whereas gzip saves 70%. But a naive glance at the graph implies gzip look roughly 3 times smaller/better than LZJB.
Classic "How to Lie with Statistics" stuff.* I would have expected better from an "analytics" database.
* Not saying they intend to lie here but it's representative of the classic text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
I'm pretty sure you're impression of 99.9999% of the HN population is wrong.
OK, found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression_ratio
Which includes this section on "Usage of the term": "There is some confusion about the term 'compression ratio', particularly outside academia and commerce. In particular, some authors use the term 'compression ratio' to mean 'space savings', even though the latter is not a ratio; and others use the term 'compression ratio' to mean its inverse, even though that equates higher compression ratio with lower compression."
So, my bad, however in my practical workplace experience the above (in italics) has been the case, hence the confusion.
Otherwise, it's not compressed. :-)
I agree that it's kind of counterintuitive.