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

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358 points tkgally | 7 comments | 30 Aug 25 03:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.671s | source | bottom

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

1. rcarmo ◴[30 Aug 25 07:04 UTC] No.45072530[source]▶
This is kind of pointless given that iOS’s autocorrect has been adding em dashes, ellipsis and smart quotes to comments since… forever.

(Like now)

It’s become a weird kind of witch hunting regarding blogs, too, and I have a 20+ year old site that renders all of its content using Markdown extensions that do the same (and that also convert dual hyphens to em dashes—something I’ve been typing for about as long).

replies(4): >>45072957 #>>45073099 #>>45073255 #>>45074249 #
2. ikari_pl ◴[30 Aug 25 08:29 UTC] No.45072957[source]▶
I use m-dashes excitedly ever since I discovered how easily available they are on the quite smart, yet completely offline android keyboard — FUTO keyboard
replies(1): >>45073360 #
3. weikju ◴[30 Aug 25 08:56 UTC] No.45073099[source]▶
This site seems to be about identifying users who used emdash BEFORE ChatGPT was released, therefore identifying who is likely not ChatGPT despite using emdashes
4. pas ◴[30 Aug 25 09:30 UTC] No.45073255[source]▶
but it required two hyphens, right? it's not like any bla-blah got autocorrected into Blah--Blah, right?
5. ◴[30 Aug 25 09:55 UTC] No.45073360[source]▶
6. chubot ◴[30 Aug 25 12:58 UTC] No.45074249[source]▶
Yeah exactly, I use em dashes, and somewhat expected to be on the leaderboard :-) But I type them as two hyphens --

On my desktop, the two hyphens remain literal. But on iOS, it turns into an em dash I think. Although it seems like I get the smart quotes more often than the em dash

replies(1): >>45075835 #
7. DamnInteresting ◴[30 Aug 25 16:19 UTC] No.45075835[source]▶
Something like 16 years ago I added a custom filter to my WordPress functions.php to convert "--" to a proper emdash in the output. If I had a nickle for every emdash in my back catalog I could finally buy that detached backyard office I've always wanted.