How are Rust, C++, and Python trending on Hacker News in the job market?
As a proxy measure for programming language trends, let’s analyze the frequency of programming language mentions in the monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” and “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?” postings on Hacker News for a few years up until December 2024. Below are the graphs.
Data as of 3/12/2024 7:00 PT.
After working with Rust for a couple of years now, I was wondering how Rust was trending on Hacker News in comparison to C++ and Python.
As a proxy measure for programming language trends, I thought it might be informative to analyze the frequency of programming language mentions in the monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” and “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?” postings on Hacker News for a few years. Let’s see the graphs.
Interesting. What can we take away?
This was just a small experiment tapping into HN data to see how a few programming languages are trending. This question was more out of personal curiosity than anything else, since I enjoyed C++ for many years as a systems programming language for robotics, self-driving vehicles, sensors, computer vision, and medical devices. Python, on the other hand, has been my go-to language for machine learning and deep learning applications for several years. Today, when starting a new project, however, I usually start out in Rust, but may fall back to either Python or C++ depending on its nature.
Once you start looking at the data many more questions open up:
While programming on my Mac and converting decimal numbers to hex and binary and using Apple’s Calculator for it – because it is built-in and works decent – I thought, I saw some wobbly lines of numbers.
My first thought was: my eyes are getting tired. But it looked annoyingly wobbly and there went my focus on the task. I had to investigate, what was going on. I took a screenshot. Can you see it in the image above?
Let me highlight the annoying detail in the image below.
Maybe you are reading this on a tiny screen, or your eyes are tired, but also… I had to see it for myself. Here is a zoomed in version below:
Yes, indeed! Some digits in the binary display section are off by one pixel. Nice anti-aliased rendering by the way, but still, why are some digits misplaced by a pixel?
How did this happen? I should add, the calculator app has been open for many days. Maybe the UI coordinate system is using floats and a rounding error aggregated over many days… I’d love to find out, but I guess I won’t. Anyways, at least my vision is not that bad.
I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t, so I won’t. Instead I’ll just share the bug on the Internet. Enjoy!
I just saw the Arc 7 series GPU at the Intel Innovation conference a couple of weeks ago. Today, I already got one in the mail. 😊 Thanks to the kind Intel team. Looking forward to test how it computes with common frameworks like tensorflow and PyTorch.
Assuming you have a dual boot system, a desktop with multiple drives. GRUB is setup to dual boot wither into Windows or into your Linux distribution. Now, one day, you change the drive configuration. You add or remove a drive or re-partition a disk. GRUB still comes up, but it fails to boot into your Linux distro. What can you do?
In GRUB press `c` to enter the console. Then search for the linux partition. Tab completion works very well.
grub> ls
(hd0) (hd0,gpt1) (hd1) (hd1,gpt1) (hd1,gpt2) (hd2)...This displays the drives and their partitions. Iterate through the drives and show their contents with ls until you identify the drive which has the vmlinuz* and initrd* files. Again, the Tab completion is super helpful.
grub> ls (hd3,gpt2)/boot/Your drive configuration and partitions will likely look different. Once you identified the Linux partition boot into it by setting the root partition, linux kernel and init ramdisk followed by the boot command. Make sure you add the correct devicename as parameter for the linux kernel. Drive names are commonly /dev/sd?? (e.g. /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2, etc) or /dev/nvme?n?p? (e.g. /dev/nvme0n1p2). If you got the device wrong, you probably end up on the console and you can list the devicenames under /dev. Below is the example for my drive configuration.
grub> set root=(hd3,gpt2)
grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.14.0-kali2-amd64 root=/dev/nvme1n1p2
grub> initrd /boot/initrd.img-5.14.0-kali2-amd64
grub> bootOnce booted into your linux distribution, you may want to update grub to detect your boot partitions and to rebuild your boot menu configuration.
# update-grubI was going to open up and post a picture of one package a day from the stack on my desk. 🙂 Today’s surprise are SMS Audio headphones: attendees of the Intel Developer Forum ’14 got these nice smart headphones with heart rate monitor in their christmas mail. Thank you, Intel!
SMS Audio Smart Headphones
Earlier in 2014 I backed a kickstarter project and I was very excited, the project made the stretch goal to build lasers into these range finders. Today I opened up the box on my desk, that arrived recently and I am really excited to test out the range finders, their precision, and their usability for robotic applications. I will post updates with more info soon.
Lidar Lite
Today I feel very excited to be recognized by Intel as a member of the Intel Software Innovator Program. 😀
… a second christmas 🙂
2nd xmas
Eclipse sandboxed by Mac OS X Gatekeeper.
Problem: Eclipse (or other application) won’t launch in Mac OS X Mavericks.
Solution: delete extended quarantine attribute – which probably Safari or Finder added after the download. Enter the following command in the Terminal to allow Eclipse to launch.
$ xattr -d com.apple.quarantine eclipse.app
This way you can leave the sandbox in place and only add exceptions for applications, that you cannot live without. For further information on and graphical configuration options of Gatekeeper check out this Ars Technica article.
PostgreSQL maintains its own package repositories for binary packages for the most common Linux distributions and operating systems, which allows you to stay up to date through your familiar package manager. If you are running Debian 6 (Squeeze), you may be using the default PostgreSQL 8.4 and if you are running Debian 7 (Wheezy) it ships with PostgreSQL 9.1. Every major version of PostgreSQL comes with significant performance improvements and feature upgrades.
Repository
To update your Debian machine to the latest PostgreSQL version all you need to do is to create an additional apt-get source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list and insert the following line for Debian 6:
deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ squeeze-pgdg main
or the following line for Debian 7:
deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ wheezy-pgdg main
Furthermore you will have to import the PostgreSQL repository signing key
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | \
apt-key add -
Upgrade
After updating your package repositories, and upgrading
apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
PostgreSQL should be upgraded and you should have two database server versions running. In my case 8.4 with all the previous data and 9.2 with no data.
Migration
To migrate the database content from the old version to the new database system (8.4 and 9.2 on my machine) you switch to the postgres user and erase the database that was created during installation of the new database system. Afterwards a pg_upgrade command will dump the data of the old server and import it into the new server.
su postgres
pg_dropcluster --stop 9.2 main
pg_upgradecluster 8.4 main
Finally you can uninstall your old version of PostgreSQL.
References:
http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/debian/
http://www.postgresql.org/download/
Wow! Today’s update for Google Glass is huge. XE7 – Version 7 of the Explorer Edition ships a mobile web browser that allows you to open links from your google search results. Also try searching “youtube <your favorite show>” to get the video stream displayed right on Glass. After XE6, which brought Photo quality improvements, XE7 seems like a big Power Up. Google Glass just became so much more powerful.
Interactive Gesture Camera.
We just won $1000 – One Thousand US Dollars! Awesome! Thank you Intel!
During the time of December 17th to February 20th Intel held the Perceptual Computing Challenge Phase 1. I entered “Google Earth Controller”, an application demonstrating touch-free navigation of Google Earth utilizing an Interactive Gesture Camera and the Intel Perceptual Computing SDK.
It allows you to fly like Superman across Earth or other planets while staying seated in your favorite chair! See video below.
Yesterday afternoon the winners were announced and Team “W” is happy that “Google Earth Controller” was awarded with Second Place. While this was just a weekend warm-up hack we are getting ready for Phase 2 of the challenge. Stay tuned!