probably more like number of job posts that include at least one programming language for conditioning. (if you want to look at relative trends). distribution over job class as well as an accurate count of actual jobs per post here also probably makes sense for measures of overall activity and longitudinal analysis. could maybe skip the deep counting if you can show that it's static across the dataset.
Number of job posts itself seems like a better measure of the state of the job market than mentions or mention-density. What aspects might mentions capture that number of postings wouldn’t?
There's also the popularity of HN itself and the popularity of posting jobs on HN that's an important factor.
You could both normalize the figures and include a separate graph for job posting density per month or something like that. Total posts on HN monthly would also be interesting to visualize. Is it trending up or down?
There's also the popularity for HN based upon the particular language.
It's possible there's skew where rust becomes more popular say, and gets the bulk of the new posts, but python or java aren't super interesting anymore. So those people stop showing up to HN.
I'd like to see the popularity of posts by language. I bet we'd see a lot fewer Java and Python posts compared to Rust.
Optionally, the novelty factor plays here: C++ created 40 years ago, Python a little bit later, and Rust less than two decades ago. The selection of programming languages should be augmented/benchamrked with the TIOBE index.
Example:
- 2021-01: posts=842, python=194, ratio = 194 / 842 = 0.23 (mentions per post)
- 2025-01: posts=487, python=87, ratio = 87 / 487 = 0.18
And then if you want to see a trend, do a moving 6 months average.
[2021-01] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25632982
[2025-01] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575537
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