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

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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

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bhickey ◴[30 Aug 25 11:10 UTC] No.45073676[source]▶
As an em dash appreciator—and there are dozens of us!—I have mixed feelings on ChatGPT embracing our little guy. My suspicion is that it's a quirk of their RLHF tuning where the em dash—which is definitely distinct from the en dash and hyphen—came to be associated with authoritative writing.
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1. Adlopa ◴[30 Aug 25 16:30 UTC] No.45075907[source]▶
The style in the UK – for professional writing, at least – has generally been ‘word en-dash word’. My understanding was that ‘wordem-dashword’ was a US style thing and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in a UK publication. (I suspect few non ‘writers’ know the difference between an en-dash and a hyphen and some publications also seem to be relaxed about it.)

So it was no surprise to me that ChatGPT used em dashes (I assume a US bias to its training data) and I immediately told it to stop using them (along with Title Case titles). (Source: professional writer for 30 years.)

https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-d

replies(1): >>45079916 #
2. JadeNB ◴[31 Aug 25 02:49 UTC] No.45079916[source]▶
I think that the really typographically professional thing, at least to US standards, is an em dash set off with hair spaces, but it's easy to insert an em dash on macOS and there's no immediate keyboard shortcut for hair spaces, so cuddled em dashes it is for me. (Enough to get on the leaderboard, anyway!)