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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

marginalia.nu

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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#391

Post by marginalia_nu »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #311
marginalia_nu wrote: post #157

Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments: word noob new p-value ---------------------------- ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016 actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05 code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081 real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08 built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10 data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05 tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05 agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024 app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078 tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e…

Such data analysis of HN related things are always so fun to read. Thanks for making this! I have a quick question but can you please tell me by what's the age of "new" accounts in your analysis? Because, I have been called AI sometimes and that's because of the "age" of my comments sometimes (and I reasonably crash afterwards) but for context, I joined in 2024. It's 2026 now, Almost gonna be 2 years. So would my acc…

New is any account flagged as green by hn. Unsure of the actual heuristic.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#392

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

goodmythical wrote: post #381
gkoberger wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree... I sometimes use worse grammar (like that ellipses) and leave in typos just so my comments feel more "real" now.

fun fact, grok and kimi are both pretty good at emulating "chat" responses with any number of prompts. "respond like a twitter user", "pretend like we're texting", etc

> fun fact, grok and kimi are both pretty good at emulating "chat" responses with any number of prompts.

> "respond like a twitter user", "pretend like we're texting", etc

+1 to it. I actually had given a response to the above parent comment itself using Kimi and I would've said that its (sort of) a good emulation fwiw.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#393

Post by TacticalCoder »

d4mi3n wrote: post #50

I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.

> I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated.

I've typeset books (back in the QuarkXPress days, before Adobe's InDesign ruled the typesetting world) and never bothered with em-dashes. Writing online is, to me, a subset of ASCII. YMMW.

But the one thing I don't understand is this: how comes people using LLM outputs are so fucking dumb as to not be able to pass it through a filter (which could even be another LLM prompt) that just says: "remove em-dashes, don't use emojis, don't look like a dumb fuck".

Why oh why are those lazy assholes who ruin our world so dumb that they can't even fix that?

It's facepalming.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#394

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #174
mancerayder wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What motivation is there to use AI to astroturf (if that's what this is) like this? Is it ideological? Is it product marketing in those relevant threads where someone is showcasing? Or is it pure technical testing, playing around?

Same as Reddit. Accumulate enough points via posting shallow and uninteresting—yet popular—dialogue to earn down voting and flagging abilities, which can be used (via automation) to manipulate discussions and suppress viewpoints. Slashdot's system was superior because mod points were finite and randomly dispensed. This entropy discouraged abuse by design—as opposed to making it a key feature of the site. It's the Ach…

Reddit awards one karma for a comment if it doesn't get downvoted. I noticed the other day that I got a pretty random and only tangentially relevant comment on a one month old post I made. I checked out the user, and they were only commenting on old posts to slowly accumulate karma. Only the poster will be notified about such a comment, and as long as it is made to be made of platitudes, most people will not bother downvoting.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#395

Post by npilk »

@dang would there be any possibility of creating a view that hides posts and comments by accounts newer than, say, Jan 1 2026? Similar to how https://news.ycombinator.com/classic works (only showing votes from the oldest accounts)?

I know this is unfair to prospective new community members, but I'm unsure of other good methods to filter out AI bots at scale. Would certainly welcome other ideas.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#396

Post by GeoAtreides »

simonw wrote: post #165

The data is available in a SQLite database on GitHub: https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers You can explore the underlying data using SQL queries in your browser here: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%253A%252F%252Fraw.githu... (that's Datasette Lite, my build of the Datasette Python web app that runs in Pyodide in WebAssembly) Here's a SQL query that shows the users in that data that posted the most comm…

apparently HN comments are licensed not only to HN, but also to some guy in sweden

cool cool cool

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#397

Post by _puk »

mghackerlady wrote: post #370
rnxrx wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also increasingly aware that my own writing style and punctuation seem to line up with what might be associated with an AI, but some of the tells (em-dashes, spaces after periods, etc) seem like artifacts of when in history we learned to write. I wonder how much crossover there would be between a trained text analysis model looking for Gen-X authors and another looking for LLM's.

People don't put spaces after periods? Do people really write.like.this?

On the Gboard keyboard. Without fail.

But that's a different issue.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#398

Post by mghackerlady »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #215
MarioMan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I’d checked, “﷽”is the widest Unicode character.

I fear for the children who had to memorize this.

It isn't a special letter or symbol in arabic, it's just a regular sentence that was added to unicode since it both holds symbolic meaning in islam and is used often enough to be useful. Some fonts render it like any other arabic, making it look like one big sentence as a single character, but others render it as calligraphy

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#399

Post by ale42 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #341
mrandish wrote: post #272

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could…

Have the same problem but with bullet points, which I learned to type years ago and have used on HN for a long time: • Like • This (option-8 on a Mac US keyboard layout). Now it looks like something only an LLM would do.

For those who are interested, that one is Alt-7 (numeric keypad) on Windows. This works because in the "OEM" codepage (e.g. 437), char 7 corresponds to a symbol that is mapped into Unicode to • (← I just typed this using Alt-7, and the arrow using Alt-27). In a similar way I type the infamous ones—the ones that give you away as an LLM even if you aren't one. It's Alt-0151, this time with no OEM codepage conversion because of the zero in front (anyway that codepage had no em-dashes, the closest one would be Alt-196, which is ─, i.e. a line drawing character).

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#400

Post by mghackerlady »

hartator wrote: post #131

Biggest tell that a comment is AI: it's deeply uninteresting. No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs.

It also feels way too sanitised, like it went through some companies PR department (granted, that's because it went through openais pr department, but still)
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