
April Is Canceled - dannymx
https://aprilcanceled.com/
======
mcv
I wish I had time for any of that. I keep reading ideas for how to deal with
the boredom of self-isolation, but nobody writes about the stress. My wife and
I have to homeschool two kids while also doing our own jobs from home. We're
lucky of course that we have jobs, and we can do them from home, and we have
two awesome and healthy kids. But homeschooling while we work really is a bit
much.

~~~
fideloper
can’t upvote enough, 5mo old and a 2yr old here and it’s.......a lot.

~~~
scruple
My wife and I have ~10 month old twins here. No help in the house these past
weeks and my wife and I are both still working (full-time, if anything the
volume of work has increased instead of decreased) remotely. Adding another
layer of complexity to the situation, she's pumping for both of them and we're
both stressed out about keeping her supply up through this ordeal (which means
we need to continue eating healthy and staying stress free... yeah, right).

It's really an unreasonable and unhealthy amount of work for 2 people. We
split the day into AM/PM shifts, we both have to help during each others
shifts, and I need to help out when she's pumping. I normally cook all of our
food, anyway, but with all of this additional overhead it's really wearing me
the hell out. We pick work back up after we finish getting the twins to bed
and eat dinner. I feel like I'm a walking corpse half of every day.

~~~
JshWright
Our twins are turning four in a couple weeks. I can't imagine being in that
first year during this time. It felt like we were drowning, and that was just
"normal" twins (plus a 5 year old).

My only unsolicited advice (because unsolicited advice is obligatory on the
internet) is to cut yourselves a whole lot of slack. A lot of stuff we worry
about as parents means very little in the grand scheme of things. Don't add
any extra stress you don't need. Take any and all "shortcuts".

~~~
thecolorblue
> A lot of stuff we worry about as parents means very little I can second
> this. Some stuff we are told means very little as well.

I have a 3 year old and a 3 month old. My wife does not work (quit her retail
job to have our second) so my situation is different. That being said, making
sure everyone is eating and sleeping as much/well as possible takes everything
we have.

------
01100011
Eh, some of us just have to keep working. No time to work on our magnum opus,
because we're trying to remain productive in the ersatz offices we've cobbled
together at home.

~~~
beart
I find myself working more hours lately because I no longer have a hard break
from leaving the office.

~~~
paulie_a
Why don't you enforce your own hard break? You are done working and not
available after a certain time.

~~~
beart
It isn't that I'm being forced to work more, it's that I end up working more
because I never get out of 'work mode' psychologically. It's become too easy
to jump on and start doing a code review or start the next ticket. I used to
work 2 days a week from home, but the routine of the office the other three
days was enough that I knew at 5 PM, even at home, that the work day is done.
I don't have that routine anymore.

------
maxerickson
Or you know, just try to make it through to the other side in a reasonably
calm manner. That's fine too.

~~~
rad_gruchalski
That’s what the post is talking about.

~~~
maxerickson
We have…different interpretations of _Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders,
that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the
color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever._ and _Let 's all
become Isaac Newton this month._

~~~
gumby
...and do all that while spending the _majority_ of your time on alchemy and
occult christian mysticism. _Then_ when you emerge from isolation transformed,
move to a big city and execute a lot of men.

If you can’t do that you’re no Isaac Newton.

~~~
tasogare
> execute a lot of men

I had to search that on Wikipedia. This is referring to the men Newton
prosecuted for counterfeit coins as part of his Master of Mint appointment.

------
tick_tock_tick
Love how the third paragraph starts all positive and reasonable then suddenly
segways into "Stop the Coronavirus Corporate Coup" and then an article about
how "Hyperbitcoinization" is coming and how the modern economy is going to
collapse from inflation.

~~~
wpietri
Whoa. I didn't look at the links. That's bonkers.

------
mdonahoe
Issac Newton didn't have kids home from school, and didn't need to attend Zoom
meetings.

~~~
rad_gruchalski
Indeed. But you still have a job and you are (hopefully) healthy. Think about
it for a second. It could be much worse.

~~~
mdonahoe
I'm just saying I don't like the pressure of having to compare myself to Issac
Newton.

Also everything could always be worse, so it's a mostly useless argument.

------
steve-benjamins
You could also rest. You don't need to force feed yourself creativity and
productivity.

I don't mean to take anything away from the author, just seeing a lot of this
sentiment on social media. Thought it would be worth voicing a counter
balance.

------
theboywho
The problem with this reasoning is that it misses the key ingredient that
might have helped people achieve great things: solitude.

Solitude is almost impossible to reach with today's attention economy (mostly
social media), people will most likely spend their quarantine watching
countless videos on the internet.

What the plague removed are distractions, we can't say the same for covid-19,
unless you're trained to resist the attention economy, but then you wouldn't
need a pandemic to do deep work.

------
morphogenesis
I know I'm lucky to still have a job at a company that seems to be doing just
fine despite the pandemic but I kind of wish I could have a month of time
completely to myself

~~~
tjr225
About to come out of two months of parental leave and it was fantastic.

------
ck2
Nice but sadly also May (what did Newton do in his second month?)

The IHME models they chose to use are too optimistic, too many people aren't
wise enough to understand or care how this works and won't be told what to do,
there are going to be rather stubborn congregations for Easter.

[https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections](https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections)

Ventilators run out way before ICU beds.

~~~
TechBro8615
Thanks for this site, I haven't seen it before.

This predicts a peak usage of 32k ventilators, but I don't see any data for
how many ventilators we already have?

~~~
tathougies
In 2010, there were about 62k ventilators in American hospitals, more than any
other developed nation at the time:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215)

If you take into account non-'full time' ventilators (not sure what these are
but apparently they exist), the US has 99k.

~~~
ck2
It's not the count but the distribution.

NY State only managed to come up with 6500, feds finally gave them 4400 more
but the federal "stockpile" turned out to be a lie.

There is also a good chance given how complex the machines are that many a
decade old from 2010 are no longer functional?

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/coronavirus-v...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/coronavirus-
ventilators.html)

~~~
tathougies
NY state has 8 million people. The United states has about 320 million. Thus,
assuming an equal distribution, I would expect NY to have about 1/40 the
number as the entire country. 62000 / 40 = 1550, so actually New York has a
lot more than one would expect.

I would expect there to be more ventilators today than 2010 (but I could be
wrong).

------
m0zg
Good advice to those of us who have the means to stay afloat, but it's not
going to be just April the way things are going now.

Unless a working prophylaxis is found/confirmed May and June will be canceled
too. That's what's unnerving about this whole situation: nobody knows what the
endgame is. Say we're at the end of April. Then what? Open stuff back up? Not
going to happen if opening it back up could realistically mean another 100K
deaths before we shut everything back down.

So let's get those drug studies going in earnest, and lets rewrite the rules
for what's "acceptable" in terms of regulation and rigor when faced with a
potential death toll of this magnitude. I'm sure we can do more than a couple
of studies at the same time, and in a shorter timeframe to preliminary results
than "8 weeks" or "18 months".

------
vlunkr
It's amazing how people here are managing to find fault in a 3 paragraph long
inspirational post. You don't have to do any of this stuff, it's not a
mandate, just a person on the internet arguing for something positive.

~~~
beart
For me, the fault is that the author seems to have an extremely limited
perspective - seemingly assuming that everyone has a bunch of free time and is
in the position to throw all their energy into creative endeavors or self
improvement.

The millions of people who are unemployed and facing unpaid bills are not
focused on their start-up idea.

There are people right now at hospitals in critical condition. Their loved
ones not allowed to visit them as they face the chance of death.

There are thousands of businesses on the verge or closing permanently. Their
owners aren't sitting around thinking they can use the next month to do more
sit ups.

There are countless families who must continue working while now taking care
of children not allowed to return to school. Those families also now have to
figure out how to actually teach their children so they don't fall behind.

On and on it goes... I don't find this page to be inspirational in the least.
I find it to be self-centered and naive. Funny thing is, I wasn't really that
bothered by it to start with, but the more I think about it, the more angry I
get at the author.

------
etrk
In an alternate reality, Newton did five pull-ups instead of inventing
calculus.

~~~
greenyoda
It's OK. Leibnitz[1] (who independently invented calculus) would also have had
to be doing pull-ups for calculus to not have been invented. Although Newton
not having invented calculus might also have hampered his contributions to
physics, which would have been a great loss.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz)

\----

Something I just learned about Leibnitz from that Wikipedia article - he was
also a pioneer in computing:

 _" He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical
calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to
Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in
1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-
produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system,
which is the foundation of all digital computers."_

~~~
etrk
Yeah, unless Leibnitz was busy making some tacos.

------
tombert
I agree with the theme of this, but the company I work for has been taking the
COVID lockdown as an excuse to have _more_ remote meetings, some of which are
late at night for me (since this company is based in California and I'm in
NY).

I definitely agree with making the best of a forced quarantine, I've been
trying to get my brother-in-law to study for his GED (or whatever they call it
in NY), but it feels like for the happy few that have a remote-friendly job,
this crisis has actually decreased my free time.

~~~
brewdad
My wife has been working from 7am-6pm every day for the past two weeks
including about 5 hours a day on the weekends. About every third night, she'll
have a 9pm meeting too and skipped a 10pm meeting last night. She's taking
fewer breaks during the day than she would at the office as well. WFH is
beginning to take a toll.

She knows that she needs to be better about stepping away and has this week,
but another new "crisis" this morning means long days ahead.

------
finaliteration
We could also just take some time to relax and focus on self-care because the
current situation is really stressful for most people. I don't think everyone
benefits from the added pressure of being expected to produce some great work
with their time in isolation. Some of us just want to get through the work day
and then spend some time playing video games or read a book.

------
pesfandiar
While the quarantine could provide a great opportunity for some to achieve
great life goals, things could be quite different for parents working and
caring for young children. With two working parents and a toddler at home, I'd
be so happy to accomplish bare minimum work and home duties; pulling an Isaac
Newton be darned!

------
millie
Bleh. Clearly written by someone who isn’t trying to work a full time job
without childcare for tiny children. This whole period will set the low
watermark for my inadequacy as a parent and worker. Can’t wait for it to be
over.

------
jackyinger
This guy is saying take the silver lining if you can. This is a positive call
to action, take it and be inspired to do something. This general sentiment
applies to life in general.

There’s a lot of comments here focusing on the negative. I think we’re all
well aware of the things that aren’t going well. I have empathy for all those
impacted by the pandemic, it does suck.

But, forgot glass half empty, go for half full! There are all kinds of
opportunities out there (not equality distributed of course), and it is up to
you to get creative and leverage those opportunities available to you no
matter how mundane they may be. Do it!

------
Punkyou2
I absolutely loved reading this! Thank you!

------
ecopoesis
Honestly? Fuck this. Millions of people are going to die. It's very likely
some of your friends and family will be in that number. It's okay to mourn.
It's expected that we will all mourn. The world we get out of this is going to
be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone.

You don't need to write King Lear or invent gravity. Just surviving will be a
miracle enough.

~~~
readme
At the time you wrote this comment, approximately 45k people have died as a
result of the coronavirus worldwide.

Glass is half empty for you then, right?

~~~
scrooched_moose
And the Trump administration's estimates from today are 100,000 to 240,000
deaths in the US alone:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-could-kill-
more-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-could-kill-more-
americans-than-some-wars.html)

Several million worldwide seems very possible. People downplaying this for too
long is a large part of why it's gotten so bad already.

Why worry? There's only 15 cases in the US. Why worry? There's only 15 cases
in my state. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in my county.

Who knows what it will look like in 2 weeks.

~~~
Kye
This is correct. There were 1.9k new cases on the first of March. The
dashboards I checked were out of date, but the latest is 75k new cases on the
30th. The curve ramped up around the 12th. And that's only people who were
able to get a test. We have no idea how big this thing is.

Anyone would recognize that kind of growth as a breakout success if it were
users on an app, but somehow they don't recognize the pattern with a disease.

~~~
oxide
I thought it would hit people how serious it was when sports stopped, movies
stopped releasing, kids couldnt go to schools and people started scalping
toilet paper.

------
poletopole
I already found a new transcendental number in my research and it has only
been three weeks.

~~~
WantonQuantum
Nice! How many transcendental numbers are we up to now?

(Kidding! I kid!)

What properties of Poletopole's constant make it interesting?

~~~
poletopole
Odds are you might see my paper on HN later this week if I'm right about what
I discovered today. But the constant popped up while I was playing with a
prime/integer model that allowed me to eliminate the complex space of any real
system. However, today I realized the significance of what I had discovered
the other day while playing with a 5-cell system and should lead me to finally
end my research ongoing since August, which was to derive a prime number space
--as silly as it sounds--but now that I have unlimited free time to work on
the paper, things have escalated quickly. I started on this project because I
needed an ambient space to work with topologies for a theoretical and highly
decentralized/distributed, partition-tolerant, declarative, multiplexed L8
(yes, L8) protocol based on some of the entropic principles of digital
communication Claude Shannon introduced, but not exclusively; it is
semantically plain HTTP at L7 but is IP tunneled over HTTP/2 and the dat/ipfs
protocols and runs on the WASM. Why I'm developing that protocol is another
story, but I will say that, as a programmer, I done. Anyways, tomorrow I will
see what the tide washes ashore.

------
pixelpoet
That's a nice sentiment but recent history doesn't have Newtons or von
Neumanns showing up, and I've often asked why. In my opinion it's quite a
serious question, will we ever see such genius again, why or why not?

------
joncp
Or...if you still have to work, then find a way to help a furloughed person be
Newton for a month. Maybe a spouse or your kids. Maybe a stranger (from six
feet away). Doesn't matter.

------
bradlys
What the benchmark is set at:

> Let's not forget the time when Isaac Newton changed the world during a
> quarantine from the plague, he did not wait idle for the plague to end, he
> continued working in isolation in this serene place where the mind was set
> free and lead to many discoveries. Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders,
> that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the
> color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever.

What they give examples of doing:

> call your dad

Give me a break.

------
thatfrenchguy
Sounds like a pretty privilege take by people like us that still have jobs.

------
rad_gruchalski
Very inspiring, with a twist. Thank you!

