←back to thread

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: 0s | 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. firesteelrain ◴[30 Aug 25 12:21 UTC] No.45073999[source]▶
Between the comments running correlations BC and AC, things still seem inconclusive.

@dang - can we add it to the HN guidelines that we should not or should call out AI when we see it? On one hand people might get defensive and the threads get out of hand. On the other hand, we don’t want AI slop.

replies(1): >>45077654 #
2. dang ◴[30 Aug 25 20:15 UTC] No.45077654[source]▶
Generated comments and bots have never been allowed on HN (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring of course), since long before ChatGPT. I've written about this a few times, e.g.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747 (Dec 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24189762 (Aug 2020)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Whether to add it to the formal guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is a different question, of course. I'm reluctant to do that, partly because it arguably follows from what's there, partly because this is still a pretty fuzzy area that is rapidly evolving, and partly because the community is already handling this issue pretty well.

One important thing to know: plenty of things not allowed in HN don't show up explicitly in the site guidelines. They are in no way a comprehensive list, and never will be!