He was (understandably) a bit sensitive about new works displacing his. He almost seemed to suspect some sort of conspiracy against Hpricot:
"Clearly, the benchmarks you see on Ruby Inside are skewed to favor Nokogiri... Why not treat Hpricot fairly and use it properly in the benchmarks? It reeks of something."
As the editor of Ruby Inside, I can confirm we (or me, as author of the piece) were not involved in any conspiracy or malicious intent against Hpricot. Heck, Why even wrote the foreword for my book :)
Further, the benchmarks we republished were not by us, but just a screenshot of benchmarks shared by the creator of Nokogiri.
This bothers me honestly, why would you accept benchmark screenshots from someone that made claims against another persons code?
Was this an interview or something? Was _why alerted to this as a chance to refute the claim by providing his own benchmarks? Could the data even be validated and not easily doctored?
The benchmarks were from what was designed to be a fair test. It might not have worked out that way, but that was the intention of the creator nonetheless. I stuck a massive disclaimer on my link to those benchmarks and let people at it (since NO benchmarks are EVER undisputed - biggest lesson I've learned). The post is at http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-xml-performance-benchmarks-16... if you want to see how it was portrayed.
If everyone had to bother validating all the third party bits and pieces that get referenced on blogs, no-one would blog. Blogging is a "hey, check this out, I ain't saying it's true, but you might find it interesting" type of affair - it's not the New York Times (which is why regular journalism is foundering; it's expensive to fact check everything and, heck, it's a Ruby blog, not a trusted source of journalism).
"Clearly, the benchmarks you see on Ruby Inside are skewed to favor Nokogiri... Why not treat Hpricot fairly and use it properly in the benchmarks? It reeks of something."
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/181699