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

(www.gally.net)
358 points tkgally | 2 comments | 30 Aug 25 03:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.464s | 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

1. tkgally ◴[30 Aug 25 07:26 UTC] No.45072635[source]▶
Due to the interest in this project, I created a second, more comprehensive version of the leaderboard:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

This second version was vibe-coded with Codex CLI. I also tried Gemini CLI, but it didn’t work very well. The SQL scripts I ran at BigQuery were by Claude.

I am not a programmer or web designer, so I will leave these pages as they are, warts and all. It was a fun project, though. I never would have attempted something like this pre-vibe-coding.

replies(1): >>45072760 #
2. SequoiaHope ◴[30 Aug 25 07:52 UTC] No.45072760[source]▶
It’s interesting to me how vibe coding changes what it means to work with computers. So much more is possible now for an individual programmer.