358 points tkgally | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 03:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.305s | 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.
I missed the point of the leaderboards completely. It is to show exactly that when you get blamed for using AI to write. You can point out that you already used it in 2009 or whatever. For that it is very useful yes :-)