cvigoe

Suppose there is a fixed deadline for submitting a report at 13:00. I have spent the last 2 hours looking at various calendar apps and it seems that almost every app forces me to treat this deadline as an event with a start time at 13:00 and an end time at 13:01 or 13:00 if I'm lucky. In other words, the best I seem to be able to do is treat the deadline as an event and try and make it as short as I can. I find this more annoying that I probably should, but I feel like deadlines, checkpoints etc. are all fundamentally different "things" to events in that they are a single moment in time as opposed to a prolonged period (think single point on a line vs. an interval).

Does anyone know of a calendar app that treats things differently?

I'm an Electronic Engineer at a top US research school and I have an 11 year old sister (I'm 22). She is smart and quite good at math for her age and is a solid rational thinker. Unfortunately her teacher "finds science boring" and has somehow managed to instill this in her: I know she would enjoy science as a subject if she could see it from my perspective but I can't think of any appropriate videos / games / books to share with her (all the vsauce, veritasium, numberphile channels etc. are a bit too advanced for her)

Does anyone on HN know of any good videos / books that can help an 11 year old girl see how beautiful science and math can be?

I have moderate experience with java (did a intro to AI class in school and all the practical work was in java) but I only picked up the language in that class (which wasn't a class intended to teach the language). I'd like a textbook recommendation for getting a more formal introduction to the language and I enjoyed the C programming language text. Wondering what the HN community considers the equivalent for java

I'm a 3rd year undergraduate student and for various reasons I'm taking the rest of the year out and returning to studying Electronic Engineering next September. I know there are a lot of "Best books of 20xx" posts on HN, but I'm looking for overall recommendations for someone who is intelligent and thinks a lot, but has done almost no reading before (excluding school readings etc.) and wants catch up with the rest of humanity in terms of literature. I intend on spending the next 6 months doing a lot of reading, and when I return to college, I intend on getting into a good habit of continued reading. I'm interested to see what the HN community considers the top books of all time to add to my list, both fiction and non-fiction. My current list is as follows (no particular order):

  1: Happy City (Charles Montgomery)

  2: Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)

  3: Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)

  4: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Peter Thiel)

  5: The Tender Bar (J. R. Moehringer)

  6: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (Charles Duhigg)

  7: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance)

  8: Superintelligence (Nick Bostrom)

  9: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter)

  10: How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie)

  11: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Eliezer Yudkowsky)

  12: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner)

  13: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Randall Munroe)

  14: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)

  15: Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference (William MacAskill)

  16: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Edward Tufte)

  17: Butterick's Practical Typography (Matthew Butterick)