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Comment by keybored | Hacker News Reader

It’s just less literate people feeling the need to out themselves.

It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.

Many (most?) WYSIWYG editors automatically convert two hyphens (--) to em dash, no need to specifically look out for it.

People aren't likely to pre-type their HN and reddit comments in a word processor though, so when you see them on such sites, it's a good indication that the comment came from an LLM and not a genuine person.

Maybe they are using a Mac (where you type alt-hyphen for a emdash)? Or run Windows and have a numeric keypad (ctrl-minus)? Or they run a browser extension like Grammarly that auto-substitutes?

I’ve typed comments here on this site in Emacs using a Firefox extension. And often I do it manually since I don’t want to lose three paragraphs to the whims of the browser state.

Not that it matters since I type such characters with my keybored directly. There are dozens of us.

If you're writing in MS Word, LibreOffice, or most word processors, typing a word and then two dashes and then a word, without any spaces, like--this will generate an em dash automatically. I learned how to do it in Freshman English in high school. Though I was also taught to double space after a period.

To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves.

You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science.

If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically.

Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?

> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?

Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.

As a hacker, you should have heard of the Compose key, or maybe of Ctrl+K in Vim.

The compose key and Ctrl+K in Vim both assume the use of Linux, or janky 3rd party software. Compose is the same argument I have already covered with Windows, you need to enter a cryptic key-combination into the keyboard, which is not intuitive.

As for the Vim argument, I'm struggling to work out how to use Vim to type on here? Perhaps you could shed some light? I suppose you could yank-put it, but I fail to see how that is less effort than copy-paste, the other argument I already covered.

Why would you write to n-dashes? HTML comments use hyphens.

Akchooally, if you want to get specific, in computer science terms it is referred to as a tack, not a hyphen or an n-dash.

Hyphen-or-minus is good enough for me.

The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.

Pandoc has had "smart" typography[0] which generates em-dash and en-dash for a long time. I found a forum post for 2011 where people were discussing em dashes and such. That thread indicates that John Gruber created a Markdown extension in 2004 which was already handling en and em dashes[2].

[0] https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/7.1-typography.html

[1] https://pandoc-discuss.narkive.com/PHmQaAgM/en-dashes-vs-em-...

[2] https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/

On Mac you type opt-shift-hyphen — like this — and on Win/Linux you use a compose key.

A lot of people who care about typography/grammar have spent a moment to learn to do this. Once learned, you can use it for the rest of your life.

You have to take a step back. The first part is not about writing prose. It is about consuming it. And all publishers who are mainstream and respectable use proper English symbols. Now they might use ASCII apostrophe instead of the recommended left single quotation mark. But using a single hyphen or two hyphens or three hyphens for an em-dash is out of the question.

Literacy starts with consuming texts and doesn’t stop once you have learned to read comfortably. People who consume a more varied selection of prose than, say, programming mailing lists will have seen plenty of em-dashes in their time and won’t balk at people using normal punctuation.

It's not just less literate, it's also people who feel the need to be amateur prosecutors.

It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line.

It's been that way throughout history.

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