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

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358 points tkgally | 4 comments | 30 Aug 25 03:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.841s | 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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LeoPanthera ◴[30 Aug 25 04:04 UTC] No.45071834[source]▶
Feature request: Sort by em-dashes per comment.

Feature request 2: Em-dash regular-dash ratio.

replies(2): >>45071868 #>>45072470 #
dragonwriter ◴[30 Aug 25 06:53 UTC] No.45072470[source]▶
> Feature request 2: Em-dash regular-dash ratio.

What's a “regular dash”?

Hyphen-minus (which isn't even a dash at all)? En-dash? Figure dash?

replies(1): >>45072555 #
1. LeoPanthera ◴[30 Aug 25 07:11 UTC] No.45072555[source]▶
Hyphen minus, yes. The one on your keyboard.
replies(1): >>45074277 #
2. layer8 ◴[30 Aug 25 13:02 UTC] No.45074277[source]▶
Keys on the keyboard aren’t characters.
replies(1): >>45076519 #
3. LeoPanthera ◴[30 Aug 25 17:40 UTC] No.45076519[source]▶
Pointless bickering. The minus sign on your keyboard is what 99% of people will hit when they want a dash.
replies(1): >>45077331 #
4. layer8 ◴[30 Aug 25 19:31 UTC] No.45077331{3}[source]▶
My point is there’s a whole software stack that determines what character is actually output when you hit that key, based on locale and IME, and also depending on the application. You meant to indicate a specific character, but specifying a key is a bad way to do that. Keyboard controllers don’t work in terms of characters. I could easily configure my OS to output U+2010 HYPHEN for that key by default, for example, and might actually do that for a typesetting application.