Hacker News em dash user leaderboard
Data
hacker news analytics leaderboard
SHOW HN2025
How HN took it
12 positive, 33 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 9 critical, out of 54 comments about the project. Thread score -0.02.
Idea: 10 for, 5 againstExecution: 2 for, 3 againstDesign: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Fun and interesting idea
From 2 comments
This is the kind of top-tier content we need on HN. These are the issues that really matter!
ayaros on HNThis is amazing The rise of the AI generated em dash is insane.
almostbasic on HN
Useful as proof of humanity for accused writers
From 1 comment
Someone 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…
thoughtpeddler on HN
Objections
Counts favor prolific users; ratio would be fairer
From 2 comments
Fun, 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.
riffraff on HNThis shows absolute numbers. It would be better to see frequency. EDIT: There's a second ranking linked at the top that shows this.
lo_zamoyski on HN
Em dashes are typed by autocorrect, so they say little about AI
From 2 comments
This 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…
rcarmo on HNI 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…
userbinator on HN
Requests
Sort by em dashes per comment or as a fraction
From 3 comments
Feature request: Sort by em-dashes per comment. Feature request 2: Em-dash regular-dash ratio.
LeoPanthera on HNI’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…
latexr on HNFun, 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.
riffraff on HN
Add double hyphen or triple dash counts
From 2 comments
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…
lynndotpy on HNSome of us use triple dash to indicate the same thing. Like LateX. You should add that too.
mickeyp on HN
Questions
Why do em dashes appear before ChatGPT's release
From 2 comments
Confused 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?
Havoc on HNI 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.
IAmGraydon on HN
How do people type em dashes
From 2 comments
I applaud this data. But how are people actually creating an em-dash in the "add comment" box? Some non-obvious OS-level shortcut?
zdw on HNHow 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…
sinuhe69 on HN
Alternatives named
Hacker News public dataset in BigQuery
From 1 comment
Using 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…
Symbiote on HN
Hacker News Algolia API
From 1 comment
You can count your own with this snippet. Just replace my username with your own. My count before this comment was 46. ``` curl -s…
sjs382 on HN