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Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT

(www.gally.net)
358 points tkgally | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 03:40 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin.

Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933

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userbinator ◴[30 Aug 25 04:14 UTC] No.45071871[source]▶
I suspect they are generated via "autocorrect", the same way as "smart (more like stupid) quotes" and other characters that tend to cause a great deal of frustration should they find their way into source code. It would be interesting to see how many users regularly make posts containing non-ASCII characters.
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1. db48x ◴[30 Aug 25 04:18 UTC] No.45071891[source]▶
No, I modified my keymap to make typing quotes and dashes and other characters easy.