Nobody is confused or disagrees about the `--hard` part. It was a minor tangent about contexts where these ASCII substitutions are established, like LaTeX (`` -> “, '' -> ”, -- -> –, --- -> —, etc.)

It’s about the top-level comment’s horror that ”--” was substituted with “an en dash, not even an em dash”. If you’re picking a substitution for “--”, en dash makes more sense. The comment you originally replied to had already agreed “that it should be left as a double hyphen”.

No, the comment was pointing out that the HN platform automatically replaces `--` in titles with `–`. (I don’t know if that’s true, but that was the intent. Nothing to do with AI.)

They meant “more appropriate [than an em dash]”. And that minus sign usage of hyphen-minus isn’t unique in Unicode either – see U+2212 MINUS SIGN.