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Comment by SlowBro | Hacker News Reader

Having upstairs neighbors would drive me batty. I did it — once.

Do they have better soundproofing or am I just too noise sensitive?

Move into a new high-rise built with a concrete structure and strict building code on noise. I have lived in two in different continents and never hear anything.

Which coubtry/state are those for people trying to find out food places to live?

Well one was in NYC and the other in Sydney. NSW has a strict building code that requires acoustic testing (literally hitting the structure with a hammer and ensuring no sound passes through).

I lived previously in a 100yr old brick walkup building in NYC. It was like my neighbors were all roommates in one house. That apartment almost drove me insane with the amount of neighbour noise I would hear at all times.

Concrete really is such a fantastic building material and yet people want to build their houses out of timber for some reason.

Townhouses (side-by-side) rather than flats tend to solve this. You are your own upstairs neighbour.

We know how to build pretty much soundproofed units; it is a matter of cost / priority.

Do they do that in Paris? Or do they suffer there as well?

Not living in Paris, but in Poland we have similar living style. I don't understand a problem. Noise isolation is usually very good in modern apartments. I can organize a party, have 15 drunk people in my apartment talking loudly and after I go out and close the door I can't hear anything. We consider "noisy" a major quality flaw for the building.

Maybe you have a hearing problem?

Or maybe his home isn't a shack without noise isolation. We live in the 21 century. It's not magic to isolate apartments from each other.

Now that I think about it, I work in a four story office building and of course I never ever hear anything from the other floors. The apartments where I was were old and cheap. Must not have been built with sound dampening in mind.

Quite the opposite. I have terrible sight, buy my hearing is very good. The building I live in is just very well isolated, but in most of the buildings you cannot hear your neighbours unless there is something pretty loud going on.

And when they are that noisy it happens only 1 or 2 times per year at most. Give people a bit of room to have fun. If it is [much] more often they might get kicked out.

Informing the neighbors or inviting them to the party also works. If you are really pushing it you buy them some flowers and ask if it wasn't to much trouble the day after. If you have a normal relationship asking if the neighbors can tune it down a bit shouldn't be a big deal either.

If your building is tall enough to be steel and concrete instead of wood, this problem goes away.

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