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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: 0.208s | 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. loughnane ◴[31 Aug 25 02:29 UTC] No.45079811[source]▶
I noticed them in the Economist around 2010, and thought they were slick. Tons of software will autodetect "---" as an emdash so that works.

Honestly, even if it doesn't make it pretty I find stringing together a few hyphens does the trick in less formal settings.