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

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1. animuchan ◴[31 Aug 25 07:57 UTC] No.45081322[source]▶
Yep, I was a Linux user for the longest time, so naturally used compose for em dashes (compose key + triple hyphen IIRC). I was later thrilled to learn that on macOS (which was called Mac OS X back then) it's even faster to type with option-shift-hyphen, and never let go of em- and en-dashes in my writing.

It's sad and not at all unsurprising that people who even half-assedly care about typography get this effort attributed to AI use.

In the post-competence workplace we're collectively building now with all the LLM coding tools, I already see people intuitively attributing non-trivial code to AI. It's a projection of own inability, more or less.

At some point any sentence with proper capitalization will be the marker of AI.