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

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358 points tkgally | 3 comments | 30 Aug 25 03:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.804s | 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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nullandvoid ◴[30 Aug 25 11:08 UTC] No.45073669[source]▶
I was hoping to see a graph of em-dash usage over time across all comments - would be interesting to see the spike post LLM
replies(1): >>45073685 #
1. jacquesm ◴[30 Aug 25 11:12 UTC] No.45073685[source]▶
Indeed, that is interesting, the author could probably spit out that answer in seconds. As - for the most part, anyway - a traditionalist and ASCII7 adherent I find it funny to think about how this is probably also a good indicator of the age of the writer.
replies(1): >>45080983 #
2. DonHopkins ◴[31 Aug 25 06:59 UTC] No.45080983[source]▶
When I saw your name on the leaderboard, I was shocked -- I say shocked -- and I hoped that all of the messages you posted with em dashes were just quoting other people using them, and ripping them a new *.
replies(1): >>45084352 #
3. jacquesm ◴[31 Aug 25 16:20 UTC] No.45084352[source]▶
Lol, I wonder how many people you made to check. How are the kittens?