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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

my first read of this title was: "how many bathrooms did neanderthals have?" making me wonder "neanderthals had bathrooms?"

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I was stuck for ages trying to parse the title, thinking it was a Google-style interview question - "How many bathrooms are there in the Netherlands?"

Me too. It really crossed a wire in my brain!

It's because up until the very last word the sentence can be passed very differently: "How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the average household?"

> thinking it was a Google-style interview question - "How many bathrooms are there in the Netherlands?"

Where does the idea that this is a Google-style interview question come from? They've never interviewed that way.

Whether it's true or not, there is the "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" meme interview question https://www.wired.com/2014/08/how-to-solve-crazy-open-ended-...

That style of question was notorious long before Google existed. It has never been associated with Google.

I thought it was associated with Microsoft.

It was. They're different companies.

We called them fermi estimation problems in grad school

Same. I re-read it at least four times. I kept seeing "How many bathrooms in the Netherlands have tile?"

I read "How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the title?" and thought "people name bathrooms?"

I'm sitting in Denisovan right now. Thank the maker for mobile devices to pass the time while nature does it's thing.

I parsed it right but still assumed Google was involved somehow.

Low risk assumption, since they seem to be involved in most websites today for some reason.

Before reading the article, I thought it was about Neanderthal themed designs on the tile.

that thought briefly crossed my mind too

To be fair it's kind of that.

GPT kind of agrees: https://chat.openai.com/share/f52068c0-2668-4343-9446-aaa145...

Why did ChatGPT say that's fascinating? I thought it was a large language model that had no feelings or opinions.

Because it's tuned to be as positive as possible about anything you give it. Try asking it to review your poetry sometime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Neanderthals certainly had bathrooms!

I read it as "How many bathrooms have Nederlanders in the tile?"

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