So it's unsurprising that rust isn't successful outside of HN. Imagine that.
Golang was created within Google in 2007, went public in 2009, and has only gotten widespread traction over the last couple of years.[1][2]
1 http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/go/ 2 http://githut.info
Rust was created within a nonprofit in 2009, with a first pre-alpha release in 2012, so let's give it a break on popularity contests for a few years yet. ;)
While it's true that it was started then, it's also important that a stable release wasn't until 2015, so in some senses, that's also where the clock towards becoming popular starts; very few people are willing to put up with what we were doing pre-1.0, and for good reason!
I first started looking at Rust before 1.0, but the runtime and the many different pointer types/sigils drove me off. I came back in the lead-up to 1.0, and saw how much the language had improved and simplified, and started getting into it at that point.
We're seeing a huge uptick in production users. And a lot more who are pretty much waiting on Tokio to deploy more. Many of them read HN, but many of them don't.