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Comment by RobertDeNiro | Hacker News Reader

"Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines" is not a rare subject.

I'm not sure what "a rare subject" means, but I interpreted it as "highly niche" -- and in the larger world of books, it's certainly that.

It is quite well documented, as I understand, so in this context I would not call it "rare". I would call a subject rare if it was rare in the context of possible training data, like for example an obscure sport or obscure programming language.

Thanks, Bob, I came here for this comment. Perhaps to NYP it's a rare subject, but to me, it's trivially banal and current. There should be no surprise at all that multiple books with this or extremely similar titles would exist. But outside the tech domain it's understandably obscure, but so is the intended audience when viewed through that lens.

Likewise, the guy is trying to push out a book in an age when people are just going to ask GPT what is X and get a dialog going. (full of hallucinations, but still!)

Getting this juicy PR is the best thing that ever happened to him.

outside of hacker news, it is

Is there a name of a phenomena when you expect someone to be equal or more knowledgeable as you are when discussing a topic? The Dunning-Kruger effect is when one overestimates their own ability. But is there an effect of overestimating someone else's? I feel as though that explains the reasoning.

There's an xkcd that describes this phenomenon quite well https://xkcd.com/2501/

Overestimated Familiarity Window. There you go - an abstruse term that you can use assuming other people will also understand it, and therefore the reference fulfills the referent.

How many books would you expect to see about that published in a given year?

I would also argue that this niche topic would be one of the first to be generated by AI, as someone technical enough to utilize the API for OpenAI/Claude/etc would likely be familiar with CI/CD topics in the first place.

Non because the topic is already covered by 1) countless blog posts 2) official documentation. Why do we now need it in a book format and waste trees is beyond me.

This kind of book content is almost always eBooks these days, so I don't think concerns about wasted trees are relevant.

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