frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

Open in hackernews

AI is right about em-dashes

https://joeldueck.com/ai-is-right-about-em-dashes.html
12•freediver•2mo ago

Comments

mattl•2mo ago
Yeah I never used them before I worked at the FSF. The FSF used the Chicago Manual of Style.
neom•2mo ago
Joel is a great guy who apparently loves the em dash. Personally, I find them particularly annoying, pedantic, and always have. Just use a comma, when I'm reading something with an em dash it's always unclear to me exactly how long I should pause, especially when reading aloud..., how dramatic...?!
damhsa•2mo ago
a short dash - with spaces around it - is clearly a punction mark, not a word-joiner. what nonsense! anyway, you can not expect everyone to use 4 or more different key combinations depending what style they want. the only solution is to make firefox, word, etc choose the right dash for word-joining, punctuation, minus, number ranges, etc. somewhat similar to how they can choose the width of spaces in justified text.
dragonwriter•2mo ago
> a short dash - with spaces around it - is clearly a punction mark, not a word-joiner. what nonsense!

That's not a "short dash", it is a hyphen with spaces around it (more precisely, an ASCII hyphen-minus, but that's really a hyphen that is overloaded in contexts where a proper typographic minus sign isn't available.) There are shorter dashes than the em-dash, one of which (the en-dash) is the normal print alternative for some uses of the em-dash, set open (with spaces) where the em-dash would be set closed (without spaces).

Also, both hyphens and en-dashes are used as word joiners in different contexts; this is not distinct from punctuation but a form of punctuation.

> anyway, you can not expect everyone to use 4 or more different key combinations depending what style they want.

For very informal writing, sure, people are often, according to their own personal comfort, going to be sloppy and approximate punctuation (heck, they are going to do that with spelling quite often.)

> the only solution is to make firefox, word, etc choose the right dash for word-joining, punctuation, minus, number ranges, etc.

Some apps have tools that automatically handle simple cases, but...it's not simple for software to figure out what your intent is and subsitute the correct punctuation mark (the are all punctuation). The actual solution is, as for other less common punctuation marks to accept that there's going to be lots of variation and substitution of easier-to-access characters in informal writing, while recognizing what is correct and maintaining it in formal contexts. But also recognizing that people that know what they are doing and know their tools are going to often use the correct ones in informal contexts, as well.

damhsa•2mo ago
it is a dash. you could use an em dash - or a 2em dash - but this dash is probably shorter than 1em - unless like me you have a monospace font. if it can be a hyphen-minus, it can be a hyphen/minus/dash. and that is what it is, because that is how it is used, ASCII be damned. the english language and its typography is beholden to neither ASCII™ nor UNICODE™.
dragonwriter•2mo ago
The hypen/minus/<various dashes> distinction long predates ASCII (much less Unicode), conflation between them is a product of ASCII with some contribution from the limitations of mechanical typewriters, the distinction isn't an imposition from ASCII onto the English language.
jasonthorsness•2mo ago
I use a plugin[1] on my blog that automatically translates ‘--‘ or ‘---‘ into em or en dashes. I did not see it coming that now my articles will look AI-written :p

Edit: just discovered iOS keyboard input also does this when you type multiple hyphens

1 - https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/

GoHardDrive Leaked Personal Data for Customers

https://mtlynch.io/goharddrive-leak/
1•shaunpud•1m ago•0 comments

Four integers are enough to write a Snake Game

https://www.andreinc.net/2022/05/01/4-integers-are-enough-to-write-a-snake-game
1•wonger_•4m ago•0 comments

It Came from Outside Our Solar System, and It Looks Like a Comet

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/science/interstellar-object-a11pi3z.html
2•handfuloflight•6m ago•0 comments

Pampena vs. Musk (ND Cal 2022) 30 June 2025 Order on motion to compel responses [pdf]

https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.cand.401655/gov.uscourts.cand.401655.218.0.pdf
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•7m ago•0 comments

Copyleft-Next

https://next.copyleft.org/
1•Bogdanp•14m ago•0 comments

The 1996 movie Independence Day in real time

https://bsky.app/profile/1996id4.bsky.social
1•Kye•19m ago•0 comments

European summers are getting brutally hot. So why is air conditioning so rare?

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/climate/europe-air-conditioning-heat-wave-intl-latam
3•sleepyguy•22m ago•0 comments

multi_db: repo that uses Datastar and has a multi db setup, one for each user

https://github.com/asmorris/multi_db
1•thunderbong•24m ago•0 comments

CSS conditionals with the new if() function

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/if-article
1•b_mc2•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made an MCP Server for Whois and RDAP

https://github.com/elgertam/whois-rdap-mcp
1•elgertam•25m ago•0 comments

France and Switzerland shut down nuclear power plants amid scorching heatwave

https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-shut-down-nuclear-power-plants-amid-scorching-heatwave
2•toomuchtodo•32m ago•0 comments

Dialects for Humans: Sounding Distinct from LLMs

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yRoXmjBKJFbc6zSFq/dialects-for-humans-sounding-distinct-from-llms
1•nebrelbug•34m ago•1 comments

Conventions for Extensible System Calls(2020)

https://lwn.net/Articles/830666/
1•howtofly•35m ago•0 comments

The deception that we crave

https://billmei.net/blog/love-reinforcement-learning
1•Kortaggio•38m ago•0 comments

The Salvadoran beach town that became a Bitcoin testbed

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250625-the-beach-town-that-became-a-bitcoin-testbed
1•rmason•40m ago•1 comments

How fast is it really? Latency, measurement and optimization in trading systems

https://www.architect.co/posts/how-fast-is-it-really
1•sneakerblack•46m ago•0 comments

Hacker News vs. Claude Code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDyDb4sX30w
1•pj4533•46m ago•1 comments

LLMs as Compilers

https://resync-games.com/blog/engineering/llms-as-compiler
2•kadhirvelm•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to export web element to code

https://copyui.online
1•Graxi•49m ago•0 comments

2025 Njpls – Revisiting the D Language – My 2^x Programming Language[Ep. 133]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJf0etigg7o
1•MikeShah•52m ago•1 comments

Stacked Clock (2014)

https://www.danieldjohnson.com/2014/06/30/stacked-clock/
1•wonger_•57m ago•0 comments

Parallel-in-Time Preconditioning for Time-Dependent Variational Mean Field Games

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01958
1•badmonster•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Bubble UI] – open-source LLM UI"

https://github.com/KenoLeon/BubbleUI
1•k3no•1h ago•0 comments

The Uncertain Future of Coding Careers and Why I'm Still Hopeful

https://jonmagic.com/posts/the-uncertain-future-of-coding-careers-and-why-im-still-hopeful/
3•mooreds•1h ago•1 comments

Gaza: Doctors Under Attack review – this crucial film is the stuff of nightmares

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/03/gaza-doctors-under-attack-review-channel-4-crucial-film-stuff-of-nightmares
32•NomDePlum•1h ago•1 comments

Poudriere Inside FreeBSD VNET Jail

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/07/03/poudriere-inside-freebsd-vnet-jail/
2•vermaden•1h ago•0 comments

Agentic Coding Tools – Not Skynet, Not a Stochastic Parrot

https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/07/agentic-coding-tools-not-skynet,-not-a-stochastic-parrot/
1•aaronbrethorst•1h ago•0 comments

Listen to Rfc2119

https://ericwbailey.website/published/you-must-listen-to-rfc-2119/
1•bluGill•1h ago•1 comments

Armin Ronacher on Agentic Coding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfOVgz_omlU
1•paulsutter•1h ago•0 comments

Super Simple "Hallucination Traps" to detect interview cheaters

6•EliotHerbst•1h ago•0 comments