Delta propagation’s view-update problem

In reactive programming, the “push” implementation can take several forms of one node (computation) passing along a directed edge (a path from one node to another) some change information to another node. Two forms of change information that can be passed is:

Complete node state
Delta propagation

A node could pass the complete node state to the next node. The node receiving the complete state of the previous node could then use this information to compute its own new state. This is a straight-forward implementation, but it can be inefficient if the next node doesn’t need the complete state of a previous node to compute its own state.

To optimize, one could use delta propagation which only passes along the changed data of a node. This would be enough for the next node to compute its new state depending on the exact implementation.

The view-update problem occurs when a program needs to maintain the state of nodes while updating their states upon an update in data. Updates in data should only affect nodes where there is a path from the node which has a change in its data and connected nodes. In a directed acyclic graph with nodes connected with directed edges, the view of nodes passed the node with the change should be updated.

Here is an example:
node A -> node B
node B -> node C
node B -> node D

If there was an update in node B, then node views for C and D should be updated ¹

The view-update problem is often described within the context of databases since relational database management system maintain different levels of views of its data. There is the external level where an end-user of a database would interact with to get data. There is the lowest level where the actual data is stored on physical hardware (disks, tape, SSDs). In between these two levels is the conceptual level which is relevant to the database software coordinating the two levels.

Each of these levels maintain their own view of the data. The external level is more interested in the data and less interested in how the data is stored on the hardware. This results in the database view-update problem. The hardware could be optimized by creating better indexes of the data or by replacing it with a faster technology. The external level should not need to know of this hardware update to generate its own view of the data.

1: For the sake of example, node A does not need to be the cause of the change in node B.

What is a runtime?

In programming, a problem have different phases in its overall lifecycle. Depending on the specific programming language, the program may require compiling. The phase when a program is compiling is called the compile time. Similarly, when a programming is executing or running this phase is called the execution time or runtime.

During a program’s runtime there may be errors. These are called runtime errors. Examples of runtime errors are dividing my zero, attempting to read a file on a file system that does not exist, and making a request to a website which does not exist.

What is compiling?

Compiling a computer program uses another computer program, a compiler, to transform/translate a program’s source code into another compiled form. The source code is typically written in a high-level programming language and the output code in another programming language.

The level of abstraction of the output code determines whether the process is called compiling or transpiling. When a program source is written in a high-level programming language and is transformed into a low-level programming language it is called compiling. When a program source is written in a high-level programming language and is transformed into another similarly abstracted level of programming language it is called transpiling.

Compiling: the Go programming language
Transpiling: the TypeScript programming language

High-level programming language

A high-level programming language is a programming language which abstracts away some of the details needed to program a computer. A computer requires such components as a processor, memory, and storage. These low-level components can be programmed directly, but most often they are not important when one is interested in programming a high-level program such as a web application for instance. To minimize the details a programmer must consider when writing a program, a programmer can select a high-level programming language to take care of the low-level details automatically.

There may be ways to access the lower-levels while programming in a high-level programming language, but this comes later on in a program’s life. Typically when programming with a high-level programming language at least in the beginning, one is interested in accomplishing some goal with little interest in the underlying details of how a computer is ran. There may be a time when these details become important such as when one wants program to go faster. This may mean increasing the speed at which a unit of work can be performed or the number of units of work can be performed in a duration of time.

Examples of high-level programming languages are: Javascript, Python, Ruby, PHP

Graph Sinks

A graph comprises of nodes and edges. The nodes can connect to another node when an edge connects the two. The edge can be directed or directional in that it describes a starting node and an ending node. The graph with nodes and directed edges is called a directed graph.

When a directed graph has a node with no outgoing edges, perhaps it has only other nodes connected to it via directed edges, the node can be said to be a graph sink.

An example is the following graph:
A -> B
A -> C
B -> C

The node C has only ingoing edges with no outgoing edges.

Transitive closure

Apart of learning more about Reactive programming, I came across the term Transitive Closure which has roots in Mathematics. Below I set out to decompose the concept into smaller concepts to clarify understanding.

A “set” is a strict list of elements. For example, set X can be a list of numbers {1,2,3}. An element, or number in this case, is said to be a member of the set X if it is found in set X. The number 1 has membership in set X.

Let’s also define another set Y to be {4,5,6}.

2 elements can be paired together to represent a list. The numbers 1 and 2 is a list of 2 elements or a pair. In addition to defining what elements are included and how many elements are in the list, the order can be specified. We can order 1 to be first and 2 second, or we can order 2 to be first and 1 second. In Mathematics, this list usually is written via a tuple, more specifically a 2-tuple to specify that there are only 2 elements, by arranging the elements in a specific order within "( )" Parenthesis. The tuple is a limited or finite ordered list able to contain an arbitrary number of elements. The lists described above can be written as two 2-tuples or ordered pairs; (1,2) and (2,1).

Multiple ordered pairs can be grouped in a relation which represents elements within an ordered pair are related. In this example, the specific relation is a binary or 2-place relation. The word “binary” indicates or involves the quantity of two. This is typically found in Computer Science to mean the Binary numbers 0 and 1; On or Off.

Here is a binary relation for the sets X and Y denoted by the letter R.
R = {(1,4), (1,5), (5,1)}
“1 is related to 4“. “1 is related to 5“. “5 is related to 1“.

Notice there are only 3 ordered pairs in this binary relation. This is a subset of the Cartesian product of the sets X and Y. The Cartesian product is a set of all combinations of all the elements in the sets. The full Cartesian products of sets X and Y is

X * Y = {1,2,3} * {4,5,6} = {(1,4), (1,5), (1,6), (2,4), (2,5), (2,6), (3,4), (3,5), (3,6)} Y * X = {4,5,6} * {1,2,3} = {(4,1), (4,2), (4,3), (5,1), (5,2), (5,3), (6,1), (6,2), (6,3)}

With the ordered pairs and binary relation defined, the word transitive can be explained. The transitive relation means by knowing the two relationships of some elements, a third relationship can be established. If we said a is related to b and b is related to c, then the relationship a is related to c can be established.

A more concrete example can be the following. John is friends with Jane. Jane is friends with Fred. There is a transitive relation between John and Friend since they both share the friend Jane in common.

The second word in Transitive Closure is Closure. In Mathematics, a set can be said to be closed or exhibit the Closure property when some operation or procedure done on a set only strictly outputs members already in the set. In the context of sets and binary relations, the relevant operation or procedure can be finding the relations of elements in a set.

Let’s now pull all of this together along with continuing with the previously defined set X, set Y, and the binary relation R.

set X = {1,2,3} set Y = {4,5,6} R = {(1,4), (1,5), (5,1)}

We see “1 is related to 4“. “1 is related to 5“. “5 is related to 1“. Looking at the two relationships “5 is related to 1” and “1 is related to 4“, we can establish a new transitive relation “5 is related to 4“. No other transitive relations can be established. This new pair (5,4) can be added to the ordered pairs in R. Since R is a strict set, we’d have to define a new set which includes the new ordered pair. The new set can be written as

R' = {(1,4), (1,5), (5,1), (5,4)}.

Since no other ordered pairs are necessary to represent all the relations of the numbers in the original R set, we have found the transitive closure of the binary relation R.

The formal definition of a transitive closure is:

In mathematics, the transitive closure of a binary relation R on a set X is the smallest relation on X that contains R and is transitive. Wikipedia

This was an explanation of the concept Transitive Closure using underlying concepts.

For more resources, I found this video helpful in understanding Transitive Closures since it explains the concept further with a graph: Transitive Closure Video.

Let me know your thoughts or whether there are any inaccuracies in the explanation.

Apply To All Jobs on AngelList

TL;DR: Copy and Paste this code snippet into AngelList Jobs page to apply to all jobs.

$('a.interested-button').each(function(_, button) {$(button).click()})

AngelList is a useful resource for startups, investors, and individuals looking for startup jobs. For this post, I fall into the latter category. As part of my recent job search, I perused the jobs section of AngelList, and I even expressed that I was interested in a few startups. As I went through this job search process, I asked if there was an easier way to go about this.

My solution was to apply to all the jobs within a given search. The first thing I noticed was that a user must click on an “Yes, I’m interested” button. When I examined the source code closer within Google Chrome’s Inspector, I realized that the “Yes, I’m Interested” buttons had a class of .interested-button and that each startup item had its own button already rendered to the page.

The actual solution took only one line of jQuery to implement:

$('a.interested-button').each(function(_, button) {$(button).click()})

You scroll to the bottom until you have all the search results loaded onto the page and you see “The End”

Apply script with the console

Now you’ve successfully applied to all the jobs within a given AngelList jobs search by pasting the above snippet into the console.

One Catch There is one catch however. You will not be able to apply to jobs that require a note as part of you showing your interest in the job. For a bulk apply all, this seems like a small problem. Pareto’s Principle applies here.

This being said, I do believe that a more targeted approach to job searching is more effective. A strategy where you find a handful of companies you are interested and you express interest via a warm connection or at the very least a direct email to someone within the organization with hiring authorization. You could use a tool like DirectContact to find these individuals’ email addresses

A Fix In case someone at AngelList is reading this, here is one possible solution to prevent this script from working in the future. Instead of POSTing a user is interested directly from an .interested-button click, require a user to have opened the startup job description. This way a boolean variable must be toggled before an interest is POSTed.

Possible Email Ruby Gem

PossibleEmail Gem on GitHub PossibleEmail on RubyGems

This is a continuation of my projects relating to using the undocumented Rapportive API. My previous project, Find Anyone’s email: A Ruby script, was a popular project that spurred an issue on Github requesting the script to be written as a gem. After some work, here is the final product.

There were a few motivations in making this gem. When I first released the find-any-email script, I always thought of it as a proof-of-concept instead of the end all be all. Not only did it feel like a hack, but I thought about how easy and interesting it would be to integrate the functionality into a web app if the script was converted into a gem. Another motivation I had going into this project was to improve on my RSpec specification writing. I recently finished reading through the RSpec Book, and I wanted to practice writing specs for this project. If you actually take a look at the gem’s source code, then you might notice there are 75 tests for the gem. Those 75 tests were the result of going through TDD process of Red-Green-Refactor numerous times.

I’m interested to see how this gem would be used in other people’s projects. I was actually considering of creating a sort of SaaS product around the gem or an iPhone app. It seems that these types of email-mining things are of value to some people specifically sales and business people. I actually have something up that I built a few months ago, DirectContact, but I put it on the shelf at the moment. The ideas still seems to have value for people, so I might pick it back up after finishing another project. It gets a bit old thinking about a fairly simple idea after you’ve been thinking about it for awhile.

I would like to tip my hat to Jordan Wright for being a big inspiration for this gem after he wrote his python library Rapportive

CS139P Red and Black Playing Card Suits

I am currently going through Stanford’s CS139P iPhone Application Development Course for iOS 7. I came upon the problem of having my suits only showing black for diamonds, spades, hearts, and clubs.

I started to look at other repos on GitHub of the same project, and I saw I had the same exact thing as the working solution. I then tried to copy validSuits class method in PlayingCard.m directly into my own project, and that fixed it. The problem might have been with choosing the wrong special character from the special character panel. After some looking around in the various tabs, I found the correctly colored suits and I was able apply them again.

+ (NSArray *) validSuits
{
    return @[@"♦️", @"♠️", @"♣️", @"♥️"];
}

You can copy the above class method into the PlayingCard.m to have red and black Playing Card suits.

I tried searching online, but there were no solutions to this problem. Hopefully the search engines indexes this page for others running into the same problem.

When your Backbone JS View Events not Firing

This is a direct copy of this file on GitHub. I’m reproducing here because I think it is a great checklist that actually solved my problem when my view events were not firing.

I’ve been using backbone.js to > develop some javascript-heavy application recently.

I find it quite common for new comers to come into the following > problem: why ain’t my view events firing?

By “view events” I mean a events hash like the following in a > Backbone View class declaration.
class Mine.Views.TasksNew extends Backbone.View
  events:
    "click #preview_button":"parse"
    
  constructor:(options)->
    super(options)
    
  parse:(e)->
    alert 'clicked'

  ...
When your events are not firing, the following is a useful > checklist to go through.

Maybe you have in the previous class declaration something like “el:\$(‘#myelement’)” and expecting the View to be bound to that specific element. But be cautious! The class declaration may be executed before the page is fully loaded. (This is common since I have seen most people put the class declaration before everything else). Please try to move “el:\$(‘#myelement’)” to the spot where you instantiate the View class and maybe the problem could be solved.

Maybe your “el” is too restrictive. You should be know that the objects mentioned in the events hash are restricted inside the el element.

Be aware of the order inside "click #preview_button":"parse"! It’s event followed by selector followed by handler. Did you reversed the order?

Trace down the code using firebug,etc. The code of backbone.js is well readable.

This checklist incorporated the bad things that has happened to me > that makes my events not firing. Hope it helps you!

My specific problem was solved after hitting the second item on the checklist. “el” was too restrictive. I had el: '#posts', so my events were being restricted to within the #posts div. I changed the el to el: '#posts', and that solved my problem of the events not being fired. I’m sure this checklist would come in handy one day.