Is Rust a Hacker News Bubble?

No. Obviously Rust is popular outside HN and for instance in my case and other people that I know the interest for Rust is totally unrelated to HN or any other specific platform for that matter.

In my experience there are roughly three main drivers for adopting the language: 1. performance, 2. code correctness / safety (my case) and 3. tooling/ecosystem. This is what makes Rust interesting for many devs.

That said, I do agree when the author points out the relatively low adoption by companies, mentioning reasons like hiring lag and risk aversion. C/C++ have decades of market penetration and it's only natural they're still in high demand when it comes to both legacy and new software.

I use Rust for almost all my personal projects and for recreational programming, but when it comes to the "real world", I think the best way to expand its use is to find some projects which could benefit from one of the main drivers I mentioned above and port it. Obviously this takes time, even more so when talking about starting new projects in Rust.

Go's history was different, perhaps because the learning curve is lower and thus it allowed and still allows a painless transition, including onboarding junior devs. It's a chicken and egg problem, in order for Rust to be more popular in the industry you need more projects to adopt it, but for that to happen, you need it to be more popular.