Comment by tkgally

2 months ago

Somewhat related, the leaderboard of em-dash users on HN before ChatGPT:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

35 comments

tkgally

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maplethorpe  2 months ago

They should include users who used a double hyphen, too -- not everyone has easy access to em dashes.

  • bigiain  2 months ago

    That would false positive me. I have used double dashes to delimit quote attribution for decades.

    Like this:

    "You can't believe everything you read on the internet." -- Abraham Lincoln, personal correspondence, 1863

  • gblargg  2 months ago

    Does AI use double hyphens? I thought the point was to find who wasn't AI that used proper em dashes.

    • jader201  2 months ago

      Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes, because iOS/macOS translates double dashes to em dashes.

      I think there may be a way to disable this, but I don’t care enough to bother.

      If people want to think my posts are AI generated, oh well.

      19 replies →

  • SoftTalker  2 months ago

    Double-hyphen is an en-dash. Triple-hyphen is an em-dash.

    • dragonwriter  2 months ago

      Double hyphen is replaced in some software with an en-dash (and in those, a triple hyphen is often replaced with an em-dash), and in some with an em-dash; its usually used (other than as input to one of those pieces of software) in places where an em-dash would be appropriate, but in contexts where both an em-dash set closed and an en-dash set open might be used, it is often set open.

      So, it’s not unambiguously s substitute for either is essentially its own punctuation mark used in ASCII-only environments with some influence from both the use of em-dashed and that of en-dashes in more formal environments.

Ajakks  2 months ago

I have used a dash - like that for almost 20 years, 100% of the time I ought to use a semi-colon and about half of the time for commas - it let's me just keep talking about things, the comma is harder pause. I've recently started seriously writing at a literary level, and I have fallen in love with the em dash - it has a fantastic function within established professional writing, where it is used often - its why the AI uses it so much.

a5c11  2 months ago

Apparently, it's not only em-dash that's distinctive. I've went through comments of the leader, and spot he also uses the backtick "’" instead of the apostrophe.

  • kuschku  2 months ago

    I (~100 in the leaderboard, regardless of how you sort) also frequently use ’ (unicode apostrophe) instead of ' :D