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Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933
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- zdw 1y agoI applaud this data. But how are people actually creating an em-dash in the "add comment" box? Some non-obvious OS-level shortcut?
- ronsor 1y agoCompose key, alt key codes, WinKey + . on Windows—there are many ways. It's also easy to do on most phone keyboards by holding down the hyphen key for more options.
- jer0me 1y agoOption Shift Hyphen on macOS
- acheron 1y agoYou type -- and it autocorrects on iOS.
- 9dev 1y agoYou can also long-press the dash key on the iOS keyboard.
- dullcrisp 1y agodocument.querySelector("textarea").value += '—' in the Javascript console.
- necubi 1y agoOn macOS it’s easy—opt+shift+-. The em-dash used to be a slightly snooty way for Mac users to announce themselves. Sad that the polarity of perception has reversed. I’ve been typing em-dashes since I got my first MacBook in 2006 and I’m not going to let the AI companies take my beautiful punctuation away from me.
- Kungfuturtle 1y agoI've long been a fan of the em dash—one of the first things I did when I migrated back from OSX to Windows was to set up an AutoHotKey function to map <Alt>+<-> to an em dash.
- LeoPanthera 1y agoFeature request: Sort by em-dashes per comment. Feature request 2: Em-dash regular-dash ratio.
- qrios 1y agoFeature request 3: …
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Feature request 2: Em-dash regular-dash ratio. What's a “regular dash”? Hyphen-minus (which isn't even a dash at all)? En-dash? Figure dash?
- LeoPanthera 1y agoHyphen minus, yes. The one on your keyboard.
- layer8 1y agoKeys on the keyboard aren’t characters.
- LeoPanthera 1y agoPointless bickering. The minus sign on your keyboard is what 99% of people will hit when they want a dash.
- layer8 1y agoMy point is there’s a whole software stack that determines what character is actually output when you hit that key, based on locale and IME, and also depending on the application. You meant to indicate a specific character, but specifying a key is a bad way to do that. Keyboard controllers don’t work in terms of characters. I could easily configure my OS to output U+2010 HYPHEN for that key by default, for example, and might actually do that for a typesetting application.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoIt would be interesting to compare the post-2022 usage trends among the top contenders.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 1y agoI suspect they are generated via "autocorrect", the same way as "smart (more like stupid) quotes" and other characters that tend to cause a great deal of frustration should they find their way into source code. It would be interesting to see how many users regularly make posts containing non-ASCII characters.
- dang 1y agoI'm only #2 but all mine are guaranteed hand-made, done this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071823
- lostlogin 1y agoWhen the pre 2022 versus post 2022 stats come out, all will be revealed.
- db48x 1y agoNo, I modified my keymap to make typing quotes and dashes and other characters easy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wiml 1y agoI type them manually out of habit. There are a handful of other common non-ASCII marks I have muscle memory for as well. Compose-minus-minus-minus in X It's one of the long-press punctuation marks on Android Option-shift-minus on Mac
- southwindcg 1y agoI use Autokey. I've added a bunch of occasionally-used HTML entities and Unicode characters so I don't need to go hunting for them.
- dang 1y agoThere's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27787448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27787448
- tptacek 1y agoThe em-dash giveaway is an actual Unicode em-dash character, right? I professionally had to learn Latex to write a paper in the 1990s and picked up a "---" habit ever since, and I've been wondering if that's some kind of weird LLM tell now.
- Svip 1y agoI've configured my compose key to be right alt + left ctrl; so now I can turn --- into — or --. into – (no one talks about en dashes).
- Chris_Newton 1y agoA compose key is very useful if you’re a typography snob — as many of us who studied mathematics and ended up learning TeX probably are… I haven’t been paying attention to exactly what I’ve typed with it lately, but I habitually use symbols like these on autopilot and they seem to render OK on any device that someone reading my writing is likely to be using: ≤ ≥ ≠ × — – “ ” ’ ° … ¹ ² ³ ™ • ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠ If you work in languages other than English but have a standard English keyboard layout, a compose key is handy for typing accents and non-English letters/ligatures too.
- Svip 1y agoI primarily work in Danish; but I use a US Intl AltGrDead[0] keymap, so I can access most needed symbols without the compose key, such as æ (altgr+z), ø (altgr+l) and å (altgr+w). But I still wanted to write ⅚ more easily, so I also added the compose key for even more symbols. [0] The AltGrDead variant just means that the regular dead keys on the US Intl are flipped; e.g. ' is now no longer dead per default: I have to hit altgr+' to make it dead (i.e. an acute accent (´)).
- Freak_NL 1y agoOh yes, compose-key is great for the occasional German, but even for my native Dutch it is useful — not to mention Frisian.
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
- IAmGraydon 1y agoI guess I’m confused. Why is it interesting to know how many em dashes were used before the dawn of ChatGPT? It’s how many AFTER that seems like it would be far more interesting.
- southwindcg 1y agoSome people accuse anyone who uses em dashes of using ChatGPT to write their posts. This is "proof" that actual humans use em dashes.
- vntok 1y agoThings like books are proof that actual humans use em dashes, that wasn't ever the contention. What's needed is a writing comparison before/after 2022 for these users. If there's a sudden 200% increase in the use of em-dashes from one month to the next, it's a very strong indicator that the user started LLMing their posts.
- southwindcg 1y agoPerhaps I should have qualified that humans use them in casual writing, website comments and the like, and not just in formal, published works that probably had an editor.
- tkgally 1y agoAs mentioned in the thread that included dang’s suggestion [1], examples of one’s use of em dashes timestamped before ChatGPT could be used as a defense if one is accused, on the basis of em dashes, of having written with AI. Whether this is interesting or not, well… [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883
- latexr 1y agoBecause it’s becoming a common belief that any em-dash indicates LLM writing, and us people who regularly use em-dashes are attempting to show that is a poor signal on its own. The goal is to show proof of humans using it.
- wiradikusuma 1y agoI'm actually one of the people who use em dash regularly. I treat it like a pause—like sighing. It's very easy to type it on a Mac it becomes muscle memory: Opt+Shift+Dash.
- readthenotes1 1y agoWow! ChatGPT is really good here--passes as human. J/k:)
- bee_rider 1y agoIt is like a slightly more flowing alternative to a comma, or a parenthetical that retains a little more excitement.
- mickeyp 1y agoSome of us use triple dash to indicate the same thing. Like LateX. You should add that too.
- latexr 1y agoI’d be interested in seeing how the data changes if instead of the total raw number of posts with em-dashes you instead check for their percentage considering the total number of posts. I guess the folks who registered later would be bumped up the list?
- svat 1y agoTry it here (you may have to create a Google Cloud project, but you don't have to enable billing or start the free trial): https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-data&d=hacker_news&page=dataset https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-... Click on the `+` (white over blue background) in the tab bar at the top that says "SQL query" on popup, and type the following (I use the GoogleSQL pipe syntax (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sql/pipe-syntax https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standard-sq... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347188) below, but you can also use standard SQL if you prefer): FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` |> WHERE type = 'comment' AND timestamp < '2022-11-30' |> AGGREGATE COUNT(*) AS total, COUNTIF(text LIKE '%—%') AS with_em GROUP BY `by` |> EXTEND with_em / total AS fraction_with_em |> ORDER BY fraction_with_em DESC |> WHERE total > 100 AND fraction_with_em > 0.1 (I'm in place 47 of the 516 results, with 0.29 of my comments (258 of 875) having an em dash in them.) Edit: As you also asked about timestamps: FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` |> WHERE type = 'comment' AND timestamp < '2022-11-30' |> EXTEND text LIKE '%—%' AS has_em |> AGGREGATE COUNT(*) AS total, COUNTIF(has_em) AS with_em, MIN(timestamp) AS first_comment_timestamp, MIN(IF(has_em, timestamp, NULL)) AS first_em_timestamp, TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(CAST(AVG(time) AS INT64)) AS avg_comment_timestamp, TIMESTAMP_SECONDS(CAST(AVG(IF(has_em, time, NULL)) AS INT64)) AS avg_em_timestamp, GROUP BY `by` |> EXTEND with_em / total AS fraction_with_em |> ORDER BY fraction_with_em DESC |> WHERE total > 100 AND fraction_with_em > 0.1 for most people the average timestamp is just the midpoint of when they started posting (with em dashes) and the cutoff date of 2022-11-30, and the top-place user zmgsabst stands out for having started only in late January 2022.
- Ericson2314 1y agoI do em dash on my phone, and --- on the computer. Can we expand this further? I wanna make at least the top 200!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rasse 1y agoHow about en dash usage? Has that been used as a similar false indicator?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thomasm6m6 1y agoOpenAI’s o3 was big on en dashes—one time it produced a Deep Research result containing >200 of them. I’m not aware of any other LLM using them commonly, though. I’d guess humans use them even less often; I don’t think Apple auto-inserts en dashes, and very few people (myself being one) are pedantic enough to bother. On the other hand, I don’t think o3 was ever a common choice among people copying from LLMs, so en dashes remain infrequent regardless.
- aspect0545 1y agoIn German en dashes are more common than em dashes. I’ve been using them regularly for at least 20 years, both in German and English texts. I never liked it when people just threw in ordinary hyphen instead of an en dash, but few people note the difference.
- JimDabell 1y agoYes, this is regional – British usage tends to be an en dash surrounded by spaces, where American usage tends to be an em dash with no spaces.
- mkbelieve 1y agoAs someone who leans heavily on emdashes, this has all been very annoying.
- oefrha 1y agoOr someone who uses an iPhone/iPad. WTF, it's like no one's heard of autocorrect before. Edit: And here’s me using fancy curly quotes. Maybe that’s an AI signal as well?
- cyode 1y agoJust be glad you're not building a classifier for labeling Emily Dickinson pastiche as human or AI authored. A Vibe is not a Function— Yet—how it compiles so— An unseen kind of Language— That only Coders—know—
- arcfour 1y agoSame here! I also love my bulleted lists; however, there are some key differences in how I write: - *Less formatting*: I don't start every bullet point with bold text - *Varying structure*: I don't start each list item with a one or two word summary, followed by a longer description of what I mean - *Mobile differences*: I actually only use em dashes on my phone, since it's easy to type on Android, but I refrain from their use on desktop.
- cookiengineer 1y agoHow can I get to the top of the leaderboard? Is the amount of em dashes counted or the comments that have at least one em dash inside them? You know, I am asking for...science(?). I also wanted to point out that these could be Kantonese/Mandarin/Japanese/SouthEast Asian users that use their local keymapping software because a lot of them use the idiom symbols (e.g. the dot character, too) when they switch to the English keymaps. Check out how laptops usually look like over there, a lot of manufacturers build that right into the firmware.
- nodja 1y agoGo back in time and post with em—dashes.
- cookiengineer 1y agoOkay, so step one is to buy a DeLorean. Got it.
- throwup238 1y agoThere are flux capacitor conversion kits now.
- riffraff 1y agoFun, but perhaps the ratio of em-dash per comment would be more interesting? Otherwise it looks like the "race" is biased towards just the amount of comment posted.
- viccis 1y agoI actually just tried this out using a HN dataset from HuggingFace today. I did # of comments with emdash / total comments. It shot up in 2018 for some reason and then, at the very end of the dataset, seemed to start spiking late 2024. Sadly it didn't have 2025 data, but it was enough to convince me that maybe the emdash lovers who complain haven't been lying about using it pre-genAI.
- iamacyborg 1y ago> It shot up in 2018 for some reason Probably some autocomplete related software release.
- JimDabell 1y agoiOS 11, released in September 2017, added the Smart Punctuation feature, which included turning a double hyphen into an em dash: https://daringfireball.net/2018/02/ios_messages_smart_punctuation https://daringfireball.net/2018/02/ios_messages_smart_punctu...
- ThatMedicIsASpy 1y agoI have started using triple dots as on Linux I can get them with Alt Gr + . A lot of symbols can be accessed with Alt Gr compared to Windows
- notpushkin 1y agoPlease don’t... Adding ellipsis as a separate character was a huge mistake, because it doesn’t work well: - you can’t make a ?.. or !.. with it - the spacing between the dots is awful in a lot of fonts - it is hideous in monospace - typing ellipsis properly is a very easy gesture (triple-tap the dot key), arguably easier than Alt Gr + . (depending on the keyboard)
- dragonwriter 1y ago> you can’t make a ?.. or !.. with it But an ellipsis is separate from and doesn't mmerge with sentence-terminal punctuation, whether its a period or somethig else (when it replaces words at the end of a sentence, the terminal punctuation follows the ellipsis, when at the beginning of a sentence that follows another, the ellipsis follows the punctuation.) The constructs you say can't be formed with it aren't needed.
- notpushkin 1y agoHmm, yeah, you’re right – in English this isn’t really used. However it’s a widely used punctuation in Russian (and many ex-USSR languages, too), so... no, they are needed in some cases.
- layer8 1y agoIf that is accurate, you’d have a good chance of getting a corresponding Unicode proposal accepted.
- notpushkin 1y agoIt doesn’t really make sense to me – those new characters would mostly just look the same as the combination of symbols used right now, be harder to type, and share all of the other flaws I’ve mentioned above. Might be fun though!
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- PUSH_AX 1y agoIt might be more fun to see users who’s emdash usage increased after the release.
- Moru 1y agoMaybe the HN crowd is the wrong group for such statistics, a higher percentage here probably knows how to use their keyboard and OS.
- Bud 1y ago[dead]
- 9rx 1y agoPlus being nerdier in general. I, for one, purposely use it more often because of all the hoopla.
- firesteelrain 1y agoBurn him at the stake!
- dns_snek 1y agoI think they meant after the release of ChatGPT. If someone never used them before and now uses them all the time it might indicate that they're using ChatGPT... or it might just mean that they learned how to use them after widespread discussions about it.
- withinboredom 1y agoI use em-dashes now more than ever — mostly just to mess with people.
- brookst 1y agoCertainly, it’s great fun to trigger the AI skeptics.
- astahlx 1y agoI started using emdashes in my academic career, after my advisor pointed me to the subtle differences. And since then, I like and use emdash a lot. In Latex, it is easily produced, just keep the spacing rules in mind. The Punctuation Guide is a nice reference on it https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/ https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/
- globular-toast 1y agoThere are actually four different "dashes" in La/TeX. The hyphen (-), en-dash (--) which is used for numeric rangen like 1--2, the em-dash (---) for punctuation, and the minus sign ($-$). Knuth talks about them in the TeXbook which is good fun.
- pxc 1y agoI think you can do all of those in plain text as well. There are Unicode characters for those dashes and probably more
- globular-toast 1y agoNot in ASCII. My definition of plain text is roughly "the characters I have on my keyboard". Unicode is like a superset of all possible plain texts. Useful, but I really don't like my own files containing characters I can't (easily) type. If I regularly typed in another language I would acquire a keyboard for that language. I'm not even convinced typographical symbols like various dash types even belong in Unicode at all to be honest. It seems like you have to draw a very arbitrary line somewhere.
- Symbiote 1y agoDrawing the line at "OK-ish for American English" is far too restrictive. You can't write CO₂ or m², use a fraction like ½, claim © or mention a price in Euros or Pounds Sterling. You can't even write major American place names (San José, Oʻahu).
- rcarmo 1y agoThis is kind of pointless given that iOS’s autocorrect has been adding em dashes, ellipsis and smart quotes to comments since… forever. (Like now) It’s become a weird kind of witch hunting regarding blogs, too, and I have a 20+ year old site that renders all of its content using Markdown extensions that do the same (and that also convert dual hyphens to em dashes—something I’ve been typing for about as long).
- ikari_pl 1y agoI use m-dashes excitedly ever since I discovered how easily available they are on the quite smart, yet completely offline android keyboard — FUTO keyboard
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- weikju 1y agoThis site seems to be about identifying users who used emdash BEFORE ChatGPT was released, therefore identifying who is likely not ChatGPT despite using emdashes
- pas 1y agobut it required two hyphens, right? it's not like any bla-blah got autocorrected into Blah--Blah, right?
- chubot 1y agoYeah exactly, I use em dashes, and somewhat expected to be on the leaderboard :-) But I type them as two hyphens -- On my desktop, the two hyphens remain literal. But on iOS, it turns into an em dash I think. Although it seems like I get the smart quotes more often than the em dash
- DamnInteresting 1y agoSomething like 16 years ago I added a custom filter to my WordPress functions.php to convert "--" to a proper emdash in the output. If I had a nickle for every emdash in my back catalog I could finally buy that detached backyard office I've always wanted.
- chrismorgan 1y agoAs #10 on this list, here’s how I do it on my laptop. I remap a key to the right of Space to Compose, and add various custom sequences. Before long, I was completely comfortably and casually typing dashes and curly quotes and more, and in fact it takes conscious effort for me to limit myself to ASCII when typing prose. (Writing code, writing *, /, -, ' and " is easy. But writing prose, I genuinely will write ×, ÷ if it feels the right one in that place, −, ‘/’ and “/”.) On one previous laptop keyboard I mapped Menu, on my current one RAlt is more suitable. When on Windows, I use WinCompose. On Linux, I used to just use it bare, which had advantages and disadvantages—apps implement a Compose key inconsistently, some messing things up related to includes and some handling overlapping sequences differently. More recently I wanted to be able to type Telugu and installed fcitx5 which is no longer mostly broken under Wayland like it was last time I tried, so now fcitx5 is handling the Compose sequences across the entire system, and working more consistently. Also I can use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U and get a popup where I can search Unicode by code or description. Now if only that pesky popup would handle Shift+Space and Ctrl+Backspace itself rather than letting them fall through to the parent… In my ~/.config/sway/config: input * { xkb_options "caps:backspace,compose:ralt" } (caps:backspace isn’t entirely relevant here, but it’s on the same line and I choose to mention it. When people are remapping Caps Lock, I’ve never understood why so many seem to choose to make it Escape. Just extend the left hand and slap the corner of the keyboard with the ring finger, it’s not a huge movement and is easy to reach and return. Backspace, however, tends to be needed at least as often (and yes, I say that despite using Vim), and is much harder to hit. In my mind, a far better candidate for shifting to that prime real estate.) For my ~/.XCompose, I start with the defaults and one good set of additions, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kragen/xcompose/master/dotXCompose https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kragen/xcompose/master/dot...: include "/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose" include "/home/chris/.XCompose-kragen" Then I add all kinds of additions. Lots of fine typography stuff like zero-width space and non-joiner, narrow no-break space, thin space… a few more hyphen/dash mappings… and lots of other things like nice emoji sequences, music notation stuff, Greek letters matching Vim digraphs, superscript ordinals (ˢᵗ, ⁿᵈ, ʳᵈ, ᵗʰ), the keyboard shortcut symbols macOS uses (⌘⌃⌥⇧⌫ and another dozen less common ones), control pictures like ␆, and a handful of other things. When all’s said and done: • Compose - - - gets me — EM DASH (stock) • Compose - - . gets me – EN DASH (stock) • Compose - - = gets me − MINUS SIGN (custom) • Compose - - w gets me ⸺ TWO EM DASH (custom; w for wide) • Compose - - W gets me ⸻ THREE EM DASH (custom; W for Wider) The last two I use occasionally, the other three I use very frequently. I went through a phase of using HYPHEN and SOFT HYPHEN, now I seldom use them. I also like to write &c. (italic where supported) for et cetera. For quotation marks, I also use custom mappings: <Multi_key> <semicolon> <semicolon> : "‘" U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <apostrophe> : "’" U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK <Multi_key> <colon> <colon> : "“" U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <quotedbl> : "”" U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK Think about how you physically type them, and I reckon these mappings make a lot of sense, very easy to type. Much better than the stock bindings (<' >' <" >") or kragen ones (`Space 'Space `` ''; or 6' 9' 6" 9"). —⁂— (Oh yeah, that one’s <Multi_key> <h> <r> : "—⁂—".) Now, I have one question I’d like answered. Overlapping sequences. If you have -> → and <- ← you’re fine, but when you add <-> ↔, I can’t find any way of using the <- sequence any more. Before fcitx5, some apps would ignore one or the other (in ways difficult to explain which I think involved the fact that some definitions came from includes), and some would let you terminate the sequence early and match the shorter one (e.g. Compose < - Enter). Is there some proper solution I’ve missed? I have plans for an article on my keyboard arrangements, including sharing a full .XCompose, but I’m going to finish my next major revision to my website first. Because then I’ll be able to draw things instead of just writing. —⁂— On mobile, I think I use FUTO keyboard at present, which lets me access most of these things, but not elegantly. I want to make my own keyboard layout that lets me access the good stuff more easily, but I haven’t got to it yet. Also: anyone want to join me in advocating for completion dictionaries and libraries to replace their ' apostrophes with ’, or at least to support both approaches equally? I’m fed up with not having this stuff, Vim is the only place where it was straightforward to get it about right, and mobile is just a mess.
- tkgally 1y agoDue to the interest in this project, I created a second, more comprehensive version of the leaderboard: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderboard-v2.html https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... This second version was vibe-coded with Codex CLI. I also tried Gemini CLI, but it didn’t work very well. The SQL scripts I ran at BigQuery were by Claude. I am not a programmer or web designer, so I will leave these pages as they are, warts and all. It was a fun project, though. I never would have attempted something like this pre-vibe-coding.
- SequoiaHope 1y agoIt’s interesting to me how vibe coding changes what it means to work with computers. So much more is possible now for an individual programmer.
- notpushkin 1y agoWell─────that was bound to happen.
- attogram 1y agoSo now some folks will intentially add in em dashes to get on the leaderboard — oops!
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoYou can't, it only measures posts prior to the release of ChatGPT.
- k__ 1y agoIf I had a key for it on my keyboard, I'd use it more often too.
- RobertEva 1y ago[dead]
- Symbiote 1y agoUsing the HN public dataset in Google BigQuery [0], which I think fits easily in the amount of free queries allowed: SELECT EXTRACT(YEAR FROM timestamp) AS year, SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS withDash, COUNT(*) AS total, SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*) AS fraction FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE type = 'comment' GROUP BY year ORDER BY year; year with— total frac 2006 0 12 0.000 2007 13 70858 0.000 2008 461 247922 0.001 2009 1497 491034 0.003 2010 3835 842438 0.005 2011 4719 1044913 0.005 2012 5648 1246782 0.005 2013 7881 1665185 0.005 2014 8400 1510814 0.006 2015 9967 1642912 0.006 2016 12081 2093612 0.006 2017 14530 2361709 0.006 2018 19246 2384086 0.008 2019 23662 2755063 0.009 2020 27316 3243173 0.008 2021 32863 3765921 0.009 2022 34657 4062159 0.009 2023 36611 4221940 0.009 2024 32543 3339861 0.010 2025 30608 2231919 0.014 So there's definitely been an increase. Querying for the users who use "—" most as a proportion of all their comments: SELECT `by`, SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*) AS fraction, COUNT(*) AS total, MIN(timestamp) AS minTime, MAX(timestamp) AS maxTime FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE type = 'comment' AND timestamp < '2022-11-30' GROUP BY `by` HAVING COUNT(*) > 100 ORDER BY fraction DESC LIMIT 250; zmgsabst uses them the most [1], westoncb [2] is an older account that uses them fourth-most. [0] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combinator/hacker-news https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zmgsabst https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zmgsabst [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=westoncb https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=westoncb
- LeoPanthera 1y agoI took a peak at zmgsabst's comments, but they use them with spaces around the dash — like this. ChatGPT always uses them without spaces—like this.
- Symbiote 1y agoChanging the filter to text LIKE '%—%' AND text NOT LIKE '% —%' AND text NOT LIKE '%— %' puts westoncb in the lead, followed by mucholove, trebbble, _zzaw and lexcorvus.
- phendrenad2 1y agoI probably would have made the list, but regular dashes are good enough for me - ASCII forever!!!
- Freak_NL 1y agoHeh. A top 50. No way that I'm in there — I don't post that much. Oh look, a more complete leaderbord — click. Oh. I'm at position 51.
- bobwaycott 1y agoHad the same thought. I don’t show up on this leaderboard, but I’m #42 on the “more complete” leaderboard. I’m #8 when sorting by max in a single comment—which makes even me think I may have overdone it. Finally—HN top 50 and top 10 in something I love!
- stavros 1y agoAlas, this is one I have no hope to be included in. I've never typed an em/endash in my life.
- bobwaycott 1y agoIt’s never too late to start. ;)
- stavros 1y agoAh, I'm afraid it is — you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
- dns_snek 1y agoSlightly tweaked, a leaderboard of em dash containing comments after ChatGPT release, limited to users who used them in fewer than 1% of comments before ChatGPT release, and who posted at least 200 comments before and after ChatGPT release. Data is recent (August 28th). Of course this doesn't mean they're using ChatGPT either, they could've switched devices or started using them because they felt like it. # user before_chatgpt after_chatgpt 1 fao_ 9/1777 (1 %) 36/225 (16 %) 2 tlogan 1/962 (0 %) 59/399 (15 %) 3 whynotminot 1/250 (0 %) 36/356 (10 %) 4 unclebucknasty 13/2566 (1 %) 38/378 (10 %) 5 iLemming 0/793 (0 %) 61/628 (10 %) 6 nostrebored 10/1045 (1 %) 32/331 (10 %) 7 freeone3000 0/2128 (0 %) 74/791 (9 %) 8 pdabbadabba 6/932 (1 %) 20/225 (9 %) 9 thebooktocome 4/632 (1 %) 18/208 (9 %) 10 tnecniv 0/671 (0 %) 34/446 (8 %) 11 dkersten 39/5092 (1 %) 24/318 (8 %) 12 stared 8/1565 (1 %) 29/392 (7 %) 13 ETH_start 3/385 (1 %) 75/1029 (7 %) 14 tcbawo 2/792 (0 %) 15/218 (7 %) 15 jbm 2/406 (0 %) 22/350 (6 %) Query [2]: WITH by_user AS ( SELECT `by` AS user, COUNTIF(text LIKE '%—%') AS match_count, COUNT(*) AS total_count, (timestamp >= '2022-11-30') AS after_chatgpt FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE type = 'comment' GROUP BY user, after_chatgpt ), combined AS ( SELECT user, MAX(IF(NOT after_chatgpt, match_count, 0)) AS match_before_chatgpt, MAX(IF(NOT after_chatgpt, total_count, 0)) AS total_before_chatgpt, MAX(IF(after_chatgpt, match_count, 0)) AS match_after_chatgpt, MAX(IF(after_chatgpt, total_count, 0)) AS total_after_chatgpt, FROM by_user GROUP BY user HAVING total_before_chatgpt >= 200 AND total_after_chatgpt >= 200 ), with_fractions AS ( SELECT *, SAFE_DIVIDE(match_before_chatgpt, total_before_chatgpt) AS fraction_before_chatgpt, SAFE_DIVIDE(match_after_chatgpt, total_after_chatgpt) AS fraction_after_chatgpt FROM combined ) SELECT user, FORMAT('%d/%d (%.0f %%)', match_before_chatgpt, total_before_chatgpt, ROUND(fraction_before_chatgpt*100)) AS before_chatgpt, FORMAT('%d/%d (%.0f %%)', match_after_chatgpt, total_after_chatgpt, ROUND(fraction_after_chatgpt*100)) AS after_chatgpt FROM with_fractions WHERE fraction_before_chatgpt < 0.01 ORDER BY fraction_after_chatgpt DESC LIMIT 15 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45072937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45072937 [2] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combinator/hacker-news https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi...
- maaaaattttt 1y agoI think this whole em dash topic should lead to some deeper (though not very deep) conversations: * If it was not widely used before where/how did (chat)GPT picked it up? * If it was widely used, then it shouldn't be a topic at all. But, there seems to be informal agreement that it wasn’t widely used. * Or, could GPT have inferred that even though it's not widely used, it's the better way to go (to use it). Which then makes one wonder about the whole probability of next token idea. Maybe this line of thinking falls too short of what might be really going on internally. * If it had picked up something that is widely used but in the wrong way, it should make us pause (again) about the future feedback loops these LLMs, which aren't going away, are already creating. Not just in terms of grammar and spelling but also in terms of way of thinking and seeing the world. (edit: formatting)
- msgodel 1y agoIt's used a lot in formal writing (academic papers, books etc) which are probably a large portion of chatGPTs training. If the HRL was done by professional writers then it was probably additionally biased toward using them. People are more casual on the web. It's sort of like how people can often tell when it's me in IM without my name because I properly use periods while that's unusual in that medium. ChatGPT is so correct it feels robotic.
- maaaaattttt 1y agoIt’s the most likely explanation I believe. I have no idea about the content distribution of the training data but I would have assumed twitter and Reddit content would completely dwarf the literary content. Somewhat good that if it’s indeed not the case!
- throwaway89201 1y agoThe training sets of most LLMs contain a copious amount of content from Libgen (or now: Anna's Archive), where em dashes are frequently used in literary writing.
- nullc 1y ago
- kristianp 1y agoMicrosoft word converts your dashes to em-dashes for you automatically, for a least the last decade. So as a sibling comment said, if it's professionally written, there are probably em dashes used more than regular ones.
- nullandvoid 1y agoI was hoping to see a graph of em-dash usage over time across all comments - would be interesting to see the spike post LLM
- jacquesm 1y agoIndeed, that is interesting, the author could probably spit out that answer in seconds. As - for the most part, anyway - a traditionalist and ASCII7 adherent I find it funny to think about how this is probably also a good indicator of the age of the writer.
- DonHopkins 1y agoWhen I saw your name on the leaderboard, I was shocked -- I say shocked -- and I hoped that all of the messages you posted with em dashes were just quoting other people using them, and ripping them a new *.
- jacquesm 1y agoLol, I wonder how many people you made to check. How are the kittens?
- bhickey 1y agoAs 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.
- Adlopa 1y agoThe 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 https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-d
- JadeNB 1y agoI 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!)
- muldvarp 1y agoI have strong negative feelings about it. It turned a signal of texts written with great attention to detail into a signal of AI slop. It's just kinda sad. Sometimes I think LLMs were invented specifically to annoy me.
- Gud 1y agoThe one thing LLMs do well is manipulating text. The danger is obviously that it will reduce individual expression and make everything the same mediocre sludge. For me writing is a way to capture a stream of consciousness so I don’t really see the advantage of using an LLM. When I see some trivial mediocrity I simply stop reading. It’s just not interesting.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoAs with most things, it can get interesting if you don't rely on defaults. My personal amusement in that area includes chatting up fictional characters with unique 'voices'. And even simple capture of consciousness can get more interesting if you apply stylometric analysis to it.
- Gud 1y agoMakes a lot of sense! Interesting choice of use, I’ll have to try it out. I write some sci fi. Personally I use LLMs to study languages, particularly German. I find it enormously helpful.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- firesteelrain 1y agoBetween the comments running correlations BC and AC, things still seem inconclusive. @dang - can we add it to the HN guidelines that we should not or should call out AI when we see it? On one hand people might get defensive and the threads get out of hand. On the other hand, we don’t want AI slop.
- dang 1y agoGenerated comments and bots have never been allowed on HN (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring of course), since long before ChatGPT. I've written about this a few times, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747 (Dec 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24189762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24189762 (Aug 2020) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22generated%20comments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Whether to add it to the formal guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is a different question, of course. I'm reluctant to do that, partly because it arguably follows from what's there, partly because this is still a pretty fuzzy area that is rapidly evolving, and partly because the community is currently handling this issue pretty well. This may change of course. One important thing to know: plenty of things not allowed in HN don't show up explicitly in the site guidelines. They are in no way a comprehensive list!
- ben_w 1y agoThis kind of thing is the only way I'm likely to get in a top-10-HackerNews-users list ^_^;
- atoav 1y agoPlace 33. I hate the whole LLMs em-dash thing since I now have to consider how em-dash usage impacts the perception of those reading what I wrote. At least I tended to use em-dash always with spaces surrounding it — like so. I know the anglospace-convention is to use it without spaces, but I just don't like that visually. At least one way to tell me apart from typical LLM-generated text.
- anonyMusk 1y ago[dead]
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoThis shows absolute numbers. It would be better to see frequency. EDIT: There's a second ranking linked at the top that shows this.
- qwertytyyuu 1y agoWe need a Column for em-dashes per 1000 words
- sjs382 1y agoYou can count your own with this snippet. Just replace my username with your own. My count before this comment was 46. curl -s "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=comment,author_sjs382&hitsPerPage=10000" \ | jq -r '.hits[].comment_text' \ | grep -o "—" \ | wc -l
- Rendello 1y agoThis script is awesome. I checked for "—" (em), "–" (en), and "--", along with other random strings.
- chatmasta 1y agoI just realized I’ve been using en-dash this whole time. This is an identity crisis.
- hopelite 1y agoIt seems your GPT overlord is already teaching you how to be a better human
- Rendello 1y agoMe too, I had 11 hits for the `en`, 7 for "--", and only 4 for the `em` using the curl script: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074990 Also see the relevant XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/3126/ https://www.xkcd.com/3126/
- qingcharles 1y agoThe post where we discovered dan g was an AI.
- lynndotpy 1y agoYou 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.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago> On Windows and Linux, inserting an em-dash is a laborious alt-code process. On Linux, you can set up a Compose key, after which an em-dash is compose, three hyphens (Macintosh: shift-option-hyphen), and an en-dash is compose, two hyphens, period (Macintosh: option-hyphen). Also, a left (resp. right) single (resp. double) quote is compose, less-than (resp. greater-than), typewriter single (resp. double) quote. That’s how I enter them. You can also (alternatively or at the same time) set up a “Level 3 shift” aka “Alternate Characters Key” aka AltGr, which gets you quotes with one of the English International layouts or quotes as well as dashes with an English Macintosh layout.
- nullc 1y agoI started using them in 2008 or so (I think) when I created a custom keymap to added greek characters and nbsp. I stopped using them after MacOS changed to make them automatically because then their use started to be an obvious sign of being an apple user (see also: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096459 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096459). Someone recently created some long list of my reddit comments using them as a farcical claim of having used ChatGPT to author many dozens of 2010 comments.
- llbbdd 1y agoWhy did someone go to that effort?
- sinuhe69 1y agoHow do people type em dash on the keyboard? On iOS you have to long-press the dash key, on a hardware full keyboard you have to key-in the code(?). That’s all very cumbersome and unnatural! Why people bother using em dash at all?
- thinkingemote 1y agoI mourn and celebrate the emdash as a sign and signal. I mourn our memories of it and laugh at myself in the future thinking about this when I have forgotten about it. It's like the memory of the jokes about the wacky phrases of gpt2 or the ew at the yellow hue saturated ai generated images. In the future this sign will be gone and our pattern recognition will adapt and our memory of this will also mostly be gone. Hello to future tech archeologists. The emdash isn't a meme, it will never survive and replicate but it's fun while it's lasting and I'm enjoying it in the meantime! I mourn also because in the future we may have few or no obvious signs of LLM use. These are the golden years.
- dang 1y agov1 (the submitted URL) was https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderboard.html https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo.... We've replaced it now with v2, for more complex analytical em dash explorations :) - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45075379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45075379 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45072635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45072635.
- apparent 1y agoSo does that mean ChatGPT was trained on these HNers' comments?
- Havoc 1y agoConfused by the year stats below - that shows an increase much earlier that say GPT3 release date. So I'm guessing whatever is going on isn't just AI?
- gardnr 1y agoFrom my perspective: that's the point of the web toy. It shows who was using these em dashes before they were likely copied and pasted from ChatGPT (or generated from APIs). The em dash is widely identified as a single character that highly increases the "smell" of text as being generated by AI. It is novel to see which users were producing text with an em dash before the rise of AI slop. User 'derefr' was 5 years ahead of everyone. I do wonder if there was some journalism CMS involved, or if these users figured out how to produce the character on their own volition. EDIT: 'lynndotpy' has an explanation in this thread.
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y agoIronically, I personally prefer good typography, but unless the editor for the desktop app is autocorrecting -- to —, I usually don't bother. But when I type on the phone with screen keyboard, I almost always do bother, even though entering text on mobile is objectively slower and more difficult and often with fewer options.
- JdeBP 1y agoIn this particular case, the options for mobile 'phone keyboards are greater rather than fewer. The em dash is a first class citizen on the "writer" layouts in ThumbKey, for example. * https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
- ayaros 1y agoThis is the kind of top-tier content we need on HN. These are the issues that really matter!
- nullc 1y agoI was surprised I only ranked 34th for earliest -- but then I saw it was the date my account was created.
- Lockal 1y agoI think a bit more interesting statistics is to count only \w—\w. This excludes cases like "(—)" and emdashes surrounded by spaces, which is, apparently, what Russian-speaking users like to use. Also it is an very old tradition to format page titles as <title>[Page name] — [Website name]</title>: depending on language this is a default setting for MediaWiki, WordPress, etc.
- n2d4 1y agoNot just Russian speakers put spaces around the emdash, but also the AP style guide. Also, for what it's worth, UK style guides recommend endash + spaces (but many write emdash + spaces instead), and so do some other languages (eg. German). There are more countries than just America and Russia!
- Lockal 1y agoNo, I mean in few Slavic languages emdash is replaces "is a / ist / est / es / ...", therefore you will see it in 99% of ru/be/uk Wikipedia articles *in the first sentence*. Coincidentally, in these languages emdash must be surrounded by spaces (no exceptions).
- ks2048 1y agoA related question - if you feed each comment into an LLM and asked it to classify into {human-produced, llm-produced, not-sure}, how many would it think are from LLMs? How could you try to investigate the true answer?
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoSadly, I’ve been editing it out of my writing, at least online and in emails.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rednafi 1y agoFor most write-ups, I’ve switched to en-dash flanked by two spaces these days. Easier to type and looks less gippitified imo. > But British usage - instead - uses spaces, so an en-dash or an em-dash is acceptable.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYes! #21! A list I finally made — and I was not surprised to find I was on it.
- almostbasic 1y agoThis is amazing The rise of the AI generated em dash is insane.
- loughnane 1y agoI 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.
- thoughtpeddler 1y agoSomeone should make something like this for the wider world outside of just HN. Go through all my publications through gScholar or elsewhere, and scour and parse anything I wrote publicly pre-11/30/22 to establish some kind of proof-of-humanity. Sincerely, an em-dash user who got overtaken by the GenAI wave of the mid-2020s.
- comatory 1y agoFun thing but do "winners" feel superior to others? Is that what em dash is about?