(www.gally.net)

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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lynndotpy ◴[30 Aug 25 15:17 UTC] No.45075379[source]▶

>>45071722 (OP) #

You might also want to rank by how often people use double hyphens-- like so.

I'm probably not alone here in being a longtime Linux user who started using a Macbook after the Apple Silicon transition, late 2022.

On Windows and Linux, inserting an em-dash is a laborious alt-code process. But on MacOS with an Apple keyboard, the `option` key acts like a tertiary shift, so an `–` em dash is just <option><->.

I didn't start using em-dashes (typing -- is just second nature to me and I'm still on Linux most of the time) when I got a Macbook, but I imagine some people in my shoes did.