I 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 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Changing 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.

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westoncb 6 days ago | parent [-]

I actually tweeted like a month ago that I was the reason LLMs use em dashes so much lol: https://x.com/Westoncb/status/1961802304698671407

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JdeBP 6 days ago | parent [-]

There are quite a few —es on my WWW site and on StackExchange thanks to me; and I vaguely recall that I might even have written one on Wikipedia once. But I am quite happy for you to take the blame for training the LLMs. (-:

	▲	westoncb 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		lol no problem. In reality though there's kind of a funny story behind it because I suspect the way I ended up using them so much is similar to how ChatGPT did. When I got into writing I studied grammar, then decided to read a bunch of classics and analyze their usage of punctuation in general until I had a good understanding of every bit of it. Then, in order to practice, I'd apply what I learned to anything I was writing at the time whether journal notes, conversations on AIM/IRC etc. That latter step meant I was translating a lot of casual/natural speech into a form that also had a high level of 'correctness'. And if you faithfully translate natural speech into 'correct'ly punctuated sentences, you end up using a lot of em dashes. Because ChatGPT/LLMs are tuned for natural/authentic style, as well as for a high degree of 'correctness,' you get today's state of affairs. Just a theory.

▲ Rumudiez 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The rule is spaces on both sides of an en dash – like so – or an em dash without any spaces—like this. Important to note the US keyboard layout does not have either of these or the minus glyph, just the hyphen, and it’s unadvisable to mix multiple styles

▲ eMPee584 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

& it looks awful without spaces — imho

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JKCalhoun 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Which is what I do (add a space before and after). I didn't know you weren't supposed to put the spaces until someone pointed it out to me — suggested I was not an LLM because I added the spaces.

Makes me wonder if kerning is done correctly, if the em-dash would look like there were spaces before and after when there were not.

	▲	card_zero 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not at all, no. Here's a few historical examples: 1903 edition of The Wizard of Oz — https://archive.org/details/newwizardofoz00baum/page/2/mode/... A page from Life magazine, 1894 — https://archive.org/details/sim_life_1894-08-23_24_608/page/... The Illustrated London News, 1843 — https://archive.org/details/illustrated-london-news-v002-184... The em dash pretty much just joins the two glyphs together. It's supposed to look that way.

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perilunar 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can also use an em-dash with thin spaces (U+2009) or hair spaces (U+200A), but it doesn't work on HN—they just display as regular spaces.

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colanderman 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The common guidance I've seen is en dash with spaces, em dash without.

▲ indigodaddy 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I always thought the proper usage was no space before but one space after-- like this.

	▲	wizzwizz4 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		There's no "proper usage" for any feature of English: it's all by consensus. However, I have seen that in published books from the 1900s.