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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: 0.5s | 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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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 #
1. 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
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2. ◴[30 Aug 25 09:55 UTC] No.45073360[source]▶