Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by timschmidt 18 days ago
Using dashes twice like that is valid. It's a bit like parentheses, to frame a tangential statement between them, but with emphasis instead of quietly. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

I use that construction in my totally human writing often enough. Some of us missed a few English classes it seems.

1 comments

Are you seriously going to claim that this is not LLM generated?

https://alphapixeldev.com/what-is-a-mercenary-programmer-and...

The guys twitter account is full of LLM slop: https://x.com/alphapixel

Perhaps all these other posts from the same author in completely different styles are also not LLM generated? https://wildirismarketing.com/articles-and-blog-posts/

>I use that construction in my totally human writing often enough. Some of us missed a few English classes it seems.

I made no comment as to the validity of the construction.

> Are you seriously going to claim that this is not LLM generated?

Do you see me making that claim? My comment seems to be about grammar. Do you always jump to conclusions?

> I made no comment as to the validity of the construction.

See:

> I mean look at this sentence which randomly contains the " - " pattern twice in a row

They're called parenthetical dashes. They're not random. And it's one pattern, not two. You'll find it used with parentheses (obviously) and commas as well as dashes and perhaps even other punctuation[1].

As to whether or not the post was written by AI, I don't care either way. That seems to be something you care about. But you shouldn't base those conclusions on the use of parenthetical dashes.

1: https://editorsmanual.com/articles/commas-vs-parentheses-vs-...