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

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358 points tkgally | 1 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

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PUSH_AX ◴[30 Aug 25 06:40 UTC] No.45072409[source]▶
It might be more fun to see users who’s emdash usage increased after the release.
replies(6): >>45072489 #>>45072739 #>>45072901 #>>45073019 #>>45073342 #>>45074025 #
1. akoboldfrying ◴[30 Aug 25 12:25 UTC] No.45074025[source]▶
Agreed.

More generally any measurable feature of writing that underwent a significant change in frequency around that time would be interesting to look at. Looking at frequencies across the entire post dataset would suggest likely candidates, which individual people could then be tested against. There would be lots of confounding factors and red herrings though -- like the word "ChatGPT" itself!