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Comment by dansmith1919 | Hacker News Reader

dansmith1919

At some point they told ChatGPT to put emoji's everywhere which is also a dead giveaway on the original report that it's AI. They're the new em dash.

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You dont even have to instruct it for emojis, it does it on its own. printf with emoji is an instant red flag

It loves to put emojis in print statements, it's usually a red flag for me that something is written by AI.

What was it with em dash?

People usually don't type embdash, just use regular dash (minus sign) they have already on the keyboard. ChatGPT uses emdash instead.

Ahem.

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

As #9 on the leaderboard I feel like I need to defend myself.

I’m guessing this list is defined by Mac users who all got taught em dash somewhere similar or for similar reasons. It is only easy to use on a Mac. But I wonder what is the 2nd common influence of users using it?

Android — keyboard – good for endash to !

My favourite android keyboard has a compose key and also a lot of good defaults in long touch on keys (including en and em under dash). Only downside is last android update causes the keyboard to be overlapped in landscape mode. A problem with a number of alternative keyboards out there. https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard/issues/957

This is a misconception which keeps getting repeated. It's easy to use an em-dash on any modern Linux desktop as well (and in a lot of other places).

Though it does still require nominating a key to map to Compose. And is not generally meaningfully documented. So I’d only call it easy for the sorts of people that care enough to find it.

But then, long before I had a Compose key, in my benighted days of using Windows, I figured out such codes as Alt+0151. 0150, 0151, 0153, 0169, 0176… a surprising number of them I still remember after not having typed them in a dozen years.

I miss the numeric keypad (gone on laptops) to be able to properly type my last name with its accentuated letter.

In electrical engineering I'm still using a few alt codes daily, like 248 (degree sign), 234 (Omega), 230 (mu), and 241 (plus or minus). I'd love to add 0151 to the repertoire, but I don't want people to think I used AI to write stuff....

I've never bothered to read about the compose key, but en/em-dash is accessible (in Debian) with AltGr-(Shift)-Hyphen/Minus too. Copyright (©) is AltGr-Shift-C.

On Linux I just type (in sequence):

compose - -

and it makes an em dash, it takes a quarter of a second longer to produce this.

I don't know why the compose key isn't used more often.

The compose key feels mandatory for anyone who wants to type their native langauge on an US-english layout. The combination[0] is "Compose--." though: –

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_com...

“Compose--.” produces an en dash, not an em dash. An em dash is produced by “Compose---”.

Source:

  grep -e DASH /usr/share/X11/locale/*/Compose

As it should be. I wish this convention were present across more software, “-“ “- -“ and “- - -“ should be the UI norm for entering proper dashes in text input controls.

Most software handles this fine if you configure your compositor to use a compose key.

Whoops, yep that's the one

[As an English typer] Where is this compose key on my keyboard?

(This is a vaguely Socratic answer to the question of why the compose key is not more often used.)

In Vim it's Ctrl+K. ;)

It’s not mapped to any key by default. A common choice is the right alt key.

I wrote a short guide about it last year: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2024/07/12/typing-non-english-...

My personal preference is the capslock key. I'm not using it for anything anyway

As per the wiki article someone else listed — the compose key was available on keyboards back in the 1980s (notably it was invented only 5 years after the Space Cadet keyboard was invented!).

Some DOS applications did have support for it. The reason it wasn't included is baffling, and it's especially baffling to me that other operating systems never adopted it, simply because

    compose a '

is VASTLY more user friendly to type than:

    alt-+
    1F600

which I have met some windows users who memorize that combo for things like the copyright symbol (which is simply:)

    compose o c

Or, you know — iOS. That’s huge marketshare for a keyboard that automatically converts -- to —

That probably explains everything from a statistical perspective about this em dash topic. I didn’t know that — Thanks.

Or Microsoft word. Many common tools in different contexts make it easy to do.

As it turns out, the differentiator is the level of literacy.

And whether the user cares to ‘write properly’ to boot. I love using dashes to break up sentences - but I rarely take the time to use the proper dashes, unless I’m writing professionally. I treat capitalization the same way - I rarely capitalize the first letter of a paragraph. I treat ‘rules’ like that as typographic aesthetic design conventions - optional depending on context.

You can also hold down the hyphen key and select it from the popup menu. En dash lives there, too.

In emacs, Ctr-x 8 <return> is how i type it. Pretty easy.

It's just em dash is the correct symbol, and typing it on Mac is simple: `cmd + -`

You can tell if I'm using mac or not for specific comment by the presence of em dash.

I’m disappointed that I’m on it — I’ll have to try harder.

You'd need a time machine, it only tracks prior to the release of ChatGPT.

I recently learned to use Option + Shift + `-` (dash) on macOS to type it and use it since then because somebody smarter than me told me that this is the correct one to use (please correct them if you know better :D).

Same on GNU/Linux(Debian), except Option is called AltGr.

Microsoft Word at least used to autocorrect two dashes to a single em dash, so I have plenty of old Word documents kicking around with em dashes.

I've been typing "—" since middle school 25 years ago. It's trivial on a mac and always has been (at least since OSX, not sure about classic). Some folks are just too narrow-minded to give others the benefit of the doubt.

iDevices (and maybe MacOS too?) correct various dashes to the Unicode equivalents. Double dash seems to get converted to em-dash automatically.

Some people actually do that on Github too. Absolute psychopaths.

I think the JS/Node scene was the pioneer in spamming emojis absolutely everywhere, well before AI. Maybe that's where the models picked it up from.

I really hate all those CLI applications and terminal configurations that look like circus came to town.

I don't love emojis for this purely because they're graphically inconsistent; I can't style them with my terminal font or colour scheme. But I'm a huge fan of using various (single-width) unicode chars with colour to make terminal output a lot easier to parse, visually. Colour and iconography are extremely useful.

Hieroglyphics are vastly underused.

    𓂫 ~ 𓃝 JdeBP𓆈localhost 𓅔 %                                𓅭 pts/0

Love it, first time I see that online on forums (genuinely). Gives ideas for Reddit posts

U+130B9 is probably a good one to start with over there.

(Nsfw)

what isn't in the unicode standard these days???

It's the same thing as naming your servers Titan and Cerberus, using garish RGB LEDs on every computer part (in a glass case of course), and having a keyboard that looks like a disco.

I'm a bit ashamed to say that, after using various ASCII symbols (for progress, checkmarks etc.) in the 90s and early 2000s, when I first discovered we can actually put special Unicode characters on the terminal and it will be rendered almost universally in a similar way, it was like discovering an unknown land.

While rockets and hearts seem more like unnecessary abuse, there are a few icons that really make sense in CLI and TUI programs, but now I'm hesitant to use them as then people who don't know me get suspicious it could be AI slop.

I absolutely love the checkmark and crossmark emojis for use in scripts. but I think they are visual garbage in logs.

"FastThingJS: A blazing fast thing library for humans . Made with on "

I can still see them!

At this point, we're here just to suffer.

That's because utf-8 was such an absolute mess in JS that adding an emoji in your code was a flex that it worked.

Sane languages have much less of this problem but the damage was done by the cargo cultists.

Much like how curly braces in C are placed because back in the day you needed you punch card deck to be editable, but we got stuck with it even after we stared using screens.

> Much like how curly braces in C are placed because back in the day you needed you punch card deck to be editable, but we got stuck with it even after we stared using screens.

Can you expand on this? What do curly braces have anything to do with punch card decks being editable? What do screens?

Each punch card was it's own line of text.

By putting the final curly brace on it's own card, and hence line, it meant you could add lines to blocks without having to change the old last line.

E.g. the following code meant you only had to type a new card and insert it.

     for(i=0;i<10;i++){         /* Card 1 */
          printf("%d ", i);     /* Card 2 */
     }                          /* Card 3 */

     for(i=0;i<10;i++){         /* Card 1 */
          printf("%d ", i);     /* Card 2 */
          printf("%d\n", i*i);  /* Card 3 */
     }                          /* Card 4 */

But for following had to edit and replace an old card as well.

     for(i=0;i<10;i++){         /* Card 1 */
          printf("%d ", i);}    /* Card 2 */
     
     for(i=0;i<10;i++){         /* Card 1 */
          printf("%d ", i);     /* Card 2' */
          printf("%d\n", i*i);} /* Card 3 */

This saved a bit of typing and made errors less likely.

I'm dubious of this explanation because C itself largely postdates punched cards as a major medium of data storage, and some quick searches doesn't produce any evidence of people using punch cards with C or Unix.

Ed was also line oriented.

Using regex to edit lines instead of typing them out was a step up, but not much of one.

Also my father definitely had C punch cards in the 80s.

Remember, if you’re going to do this, also make liberal use of ansi codes.

Make sure terminal detection is turned off, and, for god’s sake, don’t honor the NO_COLOR environment variable.

Otherwise, people will be able to run your stuff in production and read the logs.

The more vapid parts of social media also seem to have plenty of emoji floods, and I suspect that also made it into the training data for ChatGPT and others.

It was far before ChatGPT. I remember once on a Show HN post I commented something along the line with "The number of emoji in README makes it very hard for me to take this repo seriously" and my comment got (probably righteously) downvoted to dead.

I think I remember exactly what you're talking about, even though I completely forgot what software it was.

I believe it was a technical documentation and the author wanted to create visual associations with acteurs in the given example. Like clock for async process of ordering, (food -) order, Burger etc.

I don't remember if I commented on the issue myself, but I do remember that it reduced readability a lot - at least for me.

Here is a damn example: https://gist.github.com/BlueNexus/599962d03a1b52a8d5f595dabd...

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