Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

latestatic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 78 posts

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#51

Post by ynniv »

knome wrote: post #10
philk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a Programmer Sees When He or She Watches Inception does not have the same panache.

I've never understood the animosity towards overloading `they` as a neuter singular pronoun. It doesn't seem to introduce any sort of ambiguity in the language and replaces a whole slurry of fumbling and hackish attempts with a single widely understood syllable. It's damned convenient. Of course, I also hold a disdain for "proper quoting".

As opposed to "proper quoting?" I doubt most people understand the reference anymore.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#52

Post by Scriptor »

adbge wrote: post #33

I found the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense at times. It felt like the writer cut a lot of corners when it came to the whole logical coherency of the plot. Maybe if we blow something up they won't notice! The plot was entertaining and a good idea, but it left a lot to be desired. It's not destined to become a classic like: Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Requiem for a Dream, Primer. If you enjoyed Inception, do yourse…

Can you list some of the incoherencies? I found that things that seemed odd at first can actually be reasoned out pretty easily.

Spoilers!

For example, a friend was confused how Fischer could be revived. They explained that death with the heavy sedation would lead to limbo, so it could be concluded that dying was actually just a shortcut to go into a deeper dream state, he wasn't actually "dead". When they woke him up from that dream, he came back.

Another oddity I found was that they needed to synchronize all the kicks, wouldn't one kick in the deepest dream suffice? Well, in one level of dreaming if you think you're falling, you can actually feel it (whether the falling feeling happens in the sleeping environment (dude sleeping in a chair and being tipped) or in the dream (dude being thrown out of a building)), but at 2 levels of dreaming, the falling would be too abstract to cascade all the way up.

You probably found different glitches in the movie, but the above shows the process I used to answer some questions.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#53

Post by Scriptor »

almost wrote: post #45
bmalicoat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoilers Don't read if you haven't seen it yet! Saito dies at some level (if I remember right at the top dream level) and he enters limbo. Cobb goes there from the snow compound dream level but Saito has already been there 20-40 years (maybe they said in the movie, I forgot that too). Cobb then helps him remember Saito is in a dream so they can wake up together from the limbo state.

STILL SPOILERS Except they don't, you never see them kill themselves (to exit the dream) or pass through the other levels of dreams, it just cuts straight to the plane. Then at the end he sees his kids, but they're exactly as they appear in his dreams. The top continuing to spin just makes it more explicit. So he never made it out of limbo, when you see him awaking in the plane that's just him creating his own realit…

I think he left it very ambiguous on purpose. The kids looking exactly like in the dream might just be an artistic thing to connect everything together. Also, the top was starting to jerk around a little bit at the end, so we can't be sure if it was about to fall.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#54

Post by Scriptor »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #37
forkandwait wrote: post #34

Furthermore, ... I thought it was interesting the movie only went down 4 levels. I have a rule of thumb when working on hierarchical structures (like a directory tree holding lots of data) that three levels of hierarchy is all a person can hold in their head at a time. This is sort of the like the 7 items +/- 2, except I think that the seven items rule only applies "across" a structure. To understand more than three…

When they added the 4th level, I explicitly thought to myself "Oh, this is an effort by the filmmaker to pull us out of logical thought by making it too much to organize in our heads in real time."

SPOILERS:

It wasn't too much though, the top two were just sleeping in a plane and a falling van, which isn't too much to remember. The elevator scene was just him setting up charges, much more action was happening at the hospital and the limbo level.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#55

Post by jonpaul »

almost wrote: post #45
bmalicoat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoilers Don't read if you haven't seen it yet! Saito dies at some level (if I remember right at the top dream level) and he enters limbo. Cobb goes there from the snow compound dream level but Saito has already been there 20-40 years (maybe they said in the movie, I forgot that too). Cobb then helps him remember Saito is in a dream so they can wake up together from the limbo state.

STILL SPOILERS Except they don't, you never see them kill themselves (to exit the dream) or pass through the other levels of dreams, it just cuts straight to the plane. Then at the end he sees his kids, but they're exactly as they appear in his dreams. The top continuing to spin just makes it more explicit. So he never made it out of limbo, when you see him awaking in the plane that's just him creating his own realit…

Or you could consider that the movie creators wanted to make the point : does it really matter? As long as he was happy and got to see his kids, maybe it didn't really matter if he was dreaming or not.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#56

Post by naner »

almost wrote: post #45
bmalicoat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoilers Don't read if you haven't seen it yet! Saito dies at some level (if I remember right at the top dream level) and he enters limbo. Cobb goes there from the snow compound dream level but Saito has already been there 20-40 years (maybe they said in the movie, I forgot that too). Cobb then helps him remember Saito is in a dream so they can wake up together from the limbo state.

STILL SPOILERS Except they don't, you never see them kill themselves (to exit the dream) or pass through the other levels of dreams, it just cuts straight to the plane. Then at the end he sees his kids, but they're exactly as they appear in his dreams. The top continuing to spin just makes it more explicit. So he never made it out of limbo, when you see him awaking in the plane that's just him creating his own realit…

"Then at the end he sees his kids, but they're exactly as they appear in his dreams. The top continuing to spin just makes it more explicit."

Nolan was just doing that to mess with the audience. Yes, the kids were wearing the same clothes, but the top started wobbling right before it cut away. So the audience is left not knowing if he is stuck in limbo or not. It could be interpreted either way.

Anyways, an easy way to tell if you are in a dream without relying on a totem (in the movie's universe) is to look at an analog clock. The numbers appear upside down in the dream world. For some reason this was only illustrated once in the movie.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#57

Post by nlativy »

bbgm wrote: post #43
adbge wrote: post #33

I found the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense at times. It felt like the writer cut a lot of corners when it came to the whole logical coherency of the plot. Maybe if we blow something up they won't notice! The plot was entertaining and a good idea, but it left a lot to be desired. It's not destined to become a classic like: Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Requiem for a Dream, Primer. If you enjoyed Inception, do yourse…

Movies are much too subjective. 12 monkeys had some fine writing, but the editing, direction, and acting are way better in Inception (IMO of of course). Is it an all time great? Not sure, but it's a darn fine movie

If you haven't already I would highly recommend you watch The Pier (La Jetee) which was the inspiration for 12 Monkeys. It has a really beautiful and unique style being composed almost completely of still images which suits the story very well.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#58

Post by lsd5you »

adbge wrote: post #33

I found the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense at times. It felt like the writer cut a lot of corners when it came to the whole logical coherency of the plot. Maybe if we blow something up they won't notice! The plot was entertaining and a good idea, but it left a lot to be desired. It's not destined to become a classic like: Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Requiem for a Dream, Primer. If you enjoyed Inception, do yourse…

Yes that is a comprehensive list. Reminds me of this similarly canonical list, the great universities of England: Cambridge, Oxford and Hull.

Particularly on the criteria of plot 'Requiem for a Dream' can surely not be considered a classic. Conceivably if we were willing to overlook the (lack of) plot and consider the cinematography, acting, realism and artistic choice of title then there's at least an argument. Although in my view it is really just 2hrs of Oscar juice and 'great' acting is surprisingly forthcoming given the right subject matter.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#59

Post by ilovecomputers »

twism wrote: post #48
adbge wrote: post #33

I found the movie didn't make a whole lot of sense at times. It felt like the writer cut a lot of corners when it came to the whole logical coherency of the plot. Maybe if we blow something up they won't notice! The plot was entertaining and a good idea, but it left a lot to be desired. It's not destined to become a classic like: Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Requiem for a Dream, Primer. If you enjoyed Inception, do yourse…

I felt exactly them same way when I left the theater, but then I thought "isn't that the way dreams are?" In dreams (at least mine anyways) there are solutions/objects/processess that suddenly, without explanation, just materialize out of thin air (but makes perfect sense while in the dream) to problems/events that occur in the dream and only realize how absurd the whole thing was when you wake up.

Heh, I felt the same way when I woke up this morning, but it was about the movie. I always wake up in a pissy mood and this time I was lashing out on inception, which, boiled down, is an absurd story of boys playing make believe in a dream and having delusions of grandure.

However, I'm in a better mood now and the movie is still wonderfully entertaining.

Re: What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception

#60

Post by ardit33 »

Entering Limbo = Memory Leak. The reference to an object is nullified (the subject's projection/reference is killed in the dream), so the object is leaked and there is no way to access it, until either a garbage collection happens, or when the parent process is stopped. (i.e. the subject is awaken up).
Post reply on HN