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

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358 points tkgally | 5 comments | 30 Aug 25 03:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.872s | 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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riffraff ◴[30 Aug 25 05:49 UTC] No.45072179[source]▶
Fun, but perhaps the ratio of em-dash per comment would be more interesting?

Otherwise it looks like the "race" is biased towards just the amount of comment posted.

replies(1): >>45072365 #
1. viccis ◴[30 Aug 25 06:26 UTC] No.45072365[source]▶
I actually just tried this out using a HN dataset from HuggingFace today. I did # of comments with emdash / total comments. It shot up in 2018 for some reason and then, at the very end of the dataset, seemed to start spiking late 2024. Sadly it didn't have 2025 data, but it was enough to convince me that maybe the emdash lovers who complain haven't been lying about using it pre-genAI.
replies(1): >>45072692 #
2. iamacyborg ◴[30 Aug 25 07:38 UTC] No.45072692[source]▶
> It shot up in 2018 for some reason

Probably some autocomplete related software release.

replies(1): >>45072814 #
3. JimDabell ◴[30 Aug 25 08:01 UTC] No.45072814[source]▶
iOS 11, released in September 2017, added the Smart Punctuation feature, which included turning a double hyphen into an em dash:

https://daringfireball.net/2018/02/ios_messages_smart_punctu...

replies(2): >>45075235 #>>45077093 #
4. binary132 ◴[30 Aug 25 15:00 UTC] No.45075235{3}[source]▶
I actually really hate the smart punctuation. If I want an ellipsis, give me the option, but don’t presume it’s what I meant to type. They look awful in many fonts, too.
5. viccis ◴[30 Aug 25 18:55 UTC] No.45077093{3}[source]▶
I figured it was something like this but was a bit too lazy to dig through iOS release notes haha