Is the lesson "HN polls are unscientific, biased samplings of groups of people that might or might not contain any members of the audience for your technical bo

Is the lesson "HN polls are unscientific, biased samplings of groups of people that might or might not contain any members of the audience for your technical book?" ;) It doesn't help that this is a generic poll about generic books. Of course imaginary books poll worse than imaginary websites: They're more expensive (because imaginary books have an imaginary label saying "$9.99", and imaginary websites are free and subsist purely on popular goodwill and flamewar-powered Carnot engines) and neither of them has any real content so it's impossible to evaluate the amount of imaginary value one is getting for one's imaginary money. Whereas in the real world people judge their materials in the context of specific authors, subjects, goals, and budgets. People compare (e.g.) a copy of established-Github-wizard Scott Chacon's Pro Git (a try-before-you-buy CC-licensed free book) to the thrill of trying to learn Git's canonical workflow by reading its man pages and browsing flamewars about rebase v. merge. Or a ten-minute Railscast Pro about Devise, paid for by your boss, to the option of having to admit to that selfsame boss that your project's hand-rolled authorization code got hacked.