Why are you not listening to the person who wrote the software you're using?
There's nothing wrong here. You are mixing up discarded WORK with accepted and rejected SHARES. Disregard the discarded value.
I guess the issue here is that he does not understand what "discarded work" means, does not know who wrote the software he's using and thinks that "discarded work" means that the miner will have somehow a diminished hash rate recorded by the pool, hence less income.
To put it in layman's terms, your miner is trying to find blocks. It's a brute-force approach with some parameters initiated by the pool. The miner finds hash results which fit more or less with what the pool wants to receive. If the hash results your miner finds do not comply with the minimum pool requirements they're discarded. When you submit a share and it's accepted, the pool takes into account (statistically) that you hashed a certain number of times and most of the time the hash result was under the pool requirements. When a pool rejects your share that means you hashed for nothing and the effort does not count towards your income. This is what you should monitor.
The hash results of your miner are at best, a function of luck. For a given number of blocks found (if any), you will have a large number of hashes submitted and accepted by the pool, a small number of rejected shares which were hashed in error, an average amount of hardware errors, mostly if you overclock the units and the hash result is not actually a valid hash result .. and another large number of "discarded" shares, with results so poor that even the mining software will not send the results to the pool in order to conserve bandwidth. When -ck says you should disregard this value with respect to your accepted and/or rejected shares .. it is the most qualified opinion you might get .. ever.
The best use of the discarded work vs total shares is to "compute" your luck (or how lucky your miner is) with respect to the pool requirements. As I said above on a different pool with low pool requirements you might have a smaller "discarded" value, but higher bandwith and more or less the same considered hashrate or income (considering all pools with the same hidden costs).
.. what I'm pissed of, is the number of unqualified opinions giving wrong advice ..
