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Comment by gandalfgeek | Hacker News Reader

My brain stopped in surprise after parsing the first half of that headline. "Oslo acquires ChatGPT.."?!

I, for one, welcome our new Norwegian overlords.

btw it's called a garden-path sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

__A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced.__

Nice! I get emails from Meetup with subject texts like "You're the organisator [that this and that Meetup needs]" and every time I open that email to find out what the complete sentence is and am a little bit relieved to find out I'm not an organisator of something by accident. It's on the edge, but not over it. Smart marketing from Meetup.

Never knew there was a name for these sentences.

This reminds me of something more innocuous but funny that happens to me. Innocuous because it's not on purpose.

When I forget to start Slack and someone sends me a message, Slack sends me an email saying "You have a new direct message in <channel>".

Well, it so happens that when I get this, the notification dialog that pops up to tell me about the email is just the right width that it gets cut off as "You have a new dire.."

The first several times this happened I went straight to Slack eager to find out what was so important.

Which part of that is the subject line? Does it include the entire sentence as long as your email client can display it? Or does it literally cut off the sentence mid-point? I would call that misleading and definitely over the edge.

> "You're the organisator

is visible in the overview.

> [that this and that Meetup needs]"

Is the full sentence visible after clicking.

fwiw the title is not a garden path sentence, as there’s no misleading initial parse.

“Acquired” is only really used for the purchase of businesses, at least in headlines, and especially in tech news. The awkward translation is indeed a garden path sentence when delivered to this crowd.

About the only real counterargument is that you could also interpret the translation as trading the business for 110,000 students and teachers. That would not be garden path as it would be (accidentally) misleading wording in its entirety!

I think garden pathiness requires not merely that you got the wrong noun (the company itself, not their product), but that you got an entirely different parse tree.

that explanation is far more malicious than the truth, a "google-translate"ism

could also just call it click-bait

Norway has the funds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Related but mostly in criticism of a dissimilar approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust...

The fund already owns an obscene amount of Microsoft, so they already kind of own it.

Edit: typo

I, for one, stopped at "Oslo acquires ChatGPT for 110k...", in remorse for having missed the opportunity to buy it myself at that price

And they paid in slaves?!

for 110k students plus some amount of teachers. Lifetime earnings...

So it was not just me...

Norway is such a successful country, ranking first in the Human Development Index, that it could afford to buy ChatGPT xd

"Sounds like a fair value exchange, I'm a little worried about what sama might be planning to do with those students though."

Same. I feel like the title is clickbait but also that it’s technically following the rules.

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