[pharrington]

Just to be sure, you're getting downvoted because you're claiming non-programmers can't easily understand the concept of an activity having -multiple layers-. An execution stack is but one example of this. The construction of a cake, for example, is another.

[mechanical_fish]

It's nice for someone to actually say so, thanks. I'm getting tired of all the reflexive, unexplained downvotes. HN is an unfriendly and cold place, these days.

Meanwhile, sure, it's easy to understand that Inception is a cake. I'll concede that. But: it's not so easy to frost all three layers of the cake at the same time. The part where Inception gets tricky for me is where they start intercutting from layer to layer, and taking actions on one layer that have ramifications on the others.

[javajosh]

There seems to be a pervasive misunderstanding that downvoting is for what you disagree with, rather than for comments that do not add to the discussion. That is, downvotes are for noise, upvotes are for signals, and "signal" includes things you disagree with.

My new hobby (in the XKCD sense) is upvoting every well-reasoned argument that I disagree with on HN. :)

[obilgic]

It is actuLly interesting, may be the demographics of hn users is changing gradually, meaning that programmers(people with cs degree) are becomming the minority? So people get offended when you talk about cs education...

[klez]

Maybe Common Lisp continuations could be a good example in that you go up the call stack, then down, then up again and so on.