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358 points tkgally | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | 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. dang ◴[] No.45077564[source]
v1 (the submitted URL) was https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo.... We've replaced it now v2, for more complex analytical em dash explorations :) - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45075379 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45072635.