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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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tptacek ◴[30 Aug 25 04:21 UTC] No.45071905[source]▶
The em-dash giveaway is an actual Unicode em-dash character, right? I professionally had to learn Latex to write a paper in the 1990s and picked up a "---" habit ever since, and I've been wondering if that's some kind of weird LLM tell now.
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majormajor ◴[30 Aug 25 04:36 UTC] No.45071948[source]▶
There's an easy keyboard shortcut for it on Macs. I always saw it as a signifier of "Mac user with enough interest in writing style to use em-dashes instead of parentheses."

But I'm not on a Mac right now so I don't know how to even make a real one at the moment other than that LaTeX method.

replies(3): >>45072109 #>>45073229 #>>45073375 #
Freak_NL ◴[30 Aug 25 09:25 UTC] No.45073229[source]▶
Not just Apple users. The compose-key does this on a variety of desktop operating systems, where the shortcut is COMPOSE - - - for em-dash, and - - . for en-dash.
replies(1): >>45074225 #
1. layer8 ◴[30 Aug 25 12:54 UTC] No.45074225[source]▶
Alternatively, Compose 2 - for en dash and Compose 3 - for em dash.