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Comment by abjKT26nO8 | Hacker News Reader

For me the trigger is TVs. I've been renting a flat in a poorer area for over a year now. The walls are a lot thinner than in other places. There are a lot of people today (mostly 50+ year-olds) who cannot fall to sleep without the TV on. My neighbor is one of them. And the thing with TVs is that the most irritating sound frequency they emit is the one that is barely audible when you're in the same room, but when you are in the next room and trying to sleep it is the main frequency that you hear.

Another problem is that with a cheaper flat came generally noisier neighbors, i.e. frequently throwing out late-night parties, denying anyone around the luxury of sleep.

Then there are dogs whose owners don't seem to realize that dogs need to be walked and otherwise they will bark without end. This happens most often in the mornings and can go on for 2 hours easily and sets the tone for the day just right... It seems dog owners develop a special indifference to noise and their dogs.

All of that made me miserable. There were actually moments when this situation triggered suicidal thoughts.

I don't have a problem with cars passing by on the nearby high-speed road. If anything, the sound they make (very different from the sound of cars in traffic) is calming during the night.

I've recently got a new job which pays a lot better than the previous one, so in a couple of months I plan to move to a quieter neighborhood.

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I sold my previous house precisely because of noisy neighbors (or rather their dogs). Their three dogs lived in the backyard permanently no matter what the weather - never seen them walked. Talked to the neighbors twice about the noise - no action. Called the cops at 3 in the morning - still nothing. Finally, I decided to sell the house and move somewhere where there is low dog density. I developed a dislike for dogs because of my previous neighbors. Even now, three years later, a barking dog drives me nuts, gets my heart going fast and blood boiling.

In Bavaria if your dog barks more than 30 minutes per day, the neighbours can record it on video, call the police and you will get fined. At first I thought this is astupid law but after reading your story I changed my mind.

in Bulgaria people will poison your dogs

Oh you know that happens in everywhere right?

Apparently not in the US, or not often enough to have an effect.

It happens here in the US, too[0]. The consequences, both criminal and civil, are generally not very severe. It may not be happening frequently enough to have an effect, or it may not be happening publicly enough to become a concern for owners. Plus, generally, the owners who are problems are already not very concerned about their dogs.

[0] - https://gazette.com/news/colorado-springs-woman-pleads-guilt...

I remember hearing about people putting sharp objects in food, like broken glass or blades.

Same in Belize, I hear from J.McA.

It's didn't go so well for the dog killer.

In most places without sensible regulation they'd poison the dog, which opens the slippery slope to escalation. Bavarian law prevents that.

This saddens me to hear this. I see in Zillow sooo many instances of a Yellow dot (sold, say 1/2018) then a red dot shows up as of 5/2018 and just sits on the market. The problem? the new neighbors. After analysis my wife and I have concluded, after seeing hundreds of homes (even with acreage) that neighbors are far far far the #1 reason a house goes for sale. It might be kids, dogs or music.

...and now you know why nosy HOAs are so common even though people always talk about hating them.

It should be possible to have a simple rule requiring noise not to cross into a neighbor's residential property, without having a dedicated organization of busybodies collecting dues and micromanaging everything with a constantly changing set of restrictions.

this is not very simple. sound doesn't just "stop" at a certain point; it dissipates until a specific sound can't be heard over the noise floor. the only realistic approach is to set a dB level that can't be exceeded for a sustained duration. this is how the law already works in most localities; it just isn't enforced unless you really nag the police.

You can litigate everything forever if you want to be sufficiently pedantic, but that's missing the point. It's not that you don't at some point have to make a decision about how loud is too loud. It's that you can have a noise ordinance without giving anyone the capacity to compel anyone else to use a specific landscaping company or style.

> It's that you can have a noise ordinance without giving anyone the capacity to compel anyone else to use a specific landscaping company or style.

of course you can, this is how the law already works in most relatively dense places!

your original post seemed to imply that you weren't aware of noise ordinances outside of HOA bylaws, apologies if I misunderstood.

It's easy to define a rule; the hard part is enforcing it.

I've been on an HOA board for a couple of years.

Here are some of the things I have learned.

Some people (about 5%) are cranks. We have received legal threats because another owner parked in "their" unreserved parking space. Another owner disputed the cost of a roof repair: they had calculated the size of the roof over their condo and that's all they were willing to pay. It's easy to resolve a disagreement when both parties are reasonable but challenging when one of them isn't.

Some people don't read or listen. Some of the same people ask the same questions every month. You can send emails and place flyers but you will never reach everyone.

Some people are special snowflakes. Any HOA board receives regular requests to bend the rules for individuals.

Our rules have changed several times since I joined the board. None of these changes were done on a whim - each time it was in response to an issue or a liability to the association. Owners don't see the many emails and discussions behind a rule change.

Serving on an HOA board is a thankless job and can be a substantial time commitment. I joined the board because most of the other owners had already served and someone had to do it. I ran again last year because we are in the middle of a major construction project and I didn't want to leave the other board members hanging.

TLDR - HOAs are an exercise in politics on a small scale.

Agreed. Though I think the problem is because many of the HOAs don't price in their operating costs. Eg replying to mails. Though legal costs are usually passed on to the particular special snowflake tenant/owner afterwards.

If people were more aware that managing a community is work, they migh better appreciate it, and if they know it costs them money to send their idiotic requests, they would stop sending them. (And if not the members of the HOA will make money eventually the misbehaving member paying a heavy premium for its stubbornness.)

The problem with an HOA isn't that none of them can ever be caught in a state of not being literally on fire. It's that they generally have the power to do things that will mess up your life even though they shouldn't have that power to begin with, and one can turn from benign to malicious in a short period of time without an individual homeowner being able to stop it.

If the federal government is too big to be effective, an HOA is too small to be effective. They generally don't have the resources to make decisions carefully or fairly -- or if they do it's because you spent the time yourself and then the problem is they're consuming your life. But the decisions they make are nonetheless consequential to the people subject to them, so they can easily make your life hell by forcing you to choose between stupid nonsense and spending many hours of your life fighting to prevent stupid nonsense.

I had the very same experience and also sold my house because of it. The previous owners had sold it to me without disclosing the issue, but for the same reason (we disclosed it to our buyers).

The part of the article that resonated with me most was the feeling of helplessness, of impotence, of being assaulted and being unable to do anything to defend yourself.

I decided to sell the house when I started hating the dogs themselves. It wasn’t their fault, it was their awful owner, but after months of rough sleep in my guest bedroom (further away than the master) with earplugs in, I hated it all equally.

Dogs... I can relate, but in the house it's not that bad. Heavy curtains/external blinds over windows usually are enough to filter out their barks, howls and whines. Now people with subwoofers - that's something much much much worse. You see high frequency filters well. Low frequency just goes straight through the walls and into your head and after hours of whomp whomp whomp you just want to go grab a canister of gasoline and burn the partying fuckers alive together with their whole sound setup from hell.

I live in a picturesque area, so it's usually assholes in cars coming to enjoy the views with extra bass, and while noise complaints to the police has remedied the situation quite a bit, it still randomly occurs. I've learned to really welcome bad weather, because that most often means a peaceful evening without the impotent rage.

I live with an endless barking dog. It isn't mine, but it wakes me constantly.

If there has been peace for a while and it barks, I can feel my entire body change "mode" to stressed. It is uncanny. Even if mentally it hasn't bothered me, my body still goes into battle mode.

I have the same reaction (physical) to a screaming kid. It has made raising my baby incredibly difficult (especially the first year). Mentally, I understand that it's just a crying baby and that's what they do, but physically I was shutting down - body tensing, a surge of extremely stressful energy rushing through my body and ultimately being left unable to function. My wife thought I was nuts and was just faking it. I tried searching for a medical explanation but came up short. The closest I would describe it as something I hear chronic fatigue people say -- not having energy to get up, no matter their mental state. I would sit there, practically paralyzed by stress, or whatever that stress induced.

I don't know about the paralysis but I once read an internet fact that stated our brains are innately wired to react to babies and children's screams in order to ward off potential threats to our retirement plans.

I believe it. I work in an environment that many people would consider stress inducing; I engage in amateur combat sports; however, when my six month old loses it, I absolutely get an immediate pulse raising stress reaction.

I've read articles that say that when they stress-test fighter pilots by having them do cognitive test while wearing headphones with different sounds, they usually mix in infants crying. It's one of the most distracting things for a person to hear.

For me, it wasn't when the kids started crying that was the most stressful, but when they wouldn't stop. You check their diapers, you check if they're hungry, you rock them gently, and even then sometimes they just wouldn't stop crying. After a while the noise would be so bad that I had to hand them off to my wife, and she did the same when she became too frustrated.

Funnily enough, it made me immune to other kids crying. Before I had kids I would get very irritated at noisy kids or crying infants in the subway. Now, I'm just happy it's not my kids and that it's someone else's problem!

In croatia there was a famous case of a judge ordering a dog not to bark at night.

*https://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-if-dog-keeps-barking-at-n...

People like that should really not own dogs.

Everyone wants to get a dog when it’s cute and adorable as a puppy then they move on in life and have kids and other responsibilities and the dog just becomes a burden. There are definitely good dog owners, but there’s a ton of people who just have them and don’t really do anything with them besides feed them - dogs need exercise.

I’ll admit I surrendered the only dog I ever had after having her 6 years from when I was a college student until about 3 years after graduation. People usually think this is something to be ashamed of, but I knew the lifestyle I was living at the time was not good for an active dog (golden retriever). At that point in my life I was spending full days in an office and working out at the gym 1-2 hours per day, on top of sitting in traffic an hour or two, and I was moving into a one bedroom apartment after living in houses for most of the time I had a dog. I knew I would be subjecting the dog to a life of boredom and sleeping on the couch if I kept her.

Fortunately, for dogs like Goldens it is quite easy to find great homes through breed specific rescue societies, especially here in Austin (many thanks to Gold Ribbon Rescue).

Not being as close to neighbors is the primary reason I moved from an apartment to a house several years ago.

This was both to not have to hear them when I'm trying to sleep, and to not have to worry about me being the obnoxious noisy neighbor for them when they were sleeping because I was often quite the night owl and would have liked to be able to watch a movie or listen to music at 3 AM.

Here's an aerial view centered on my house [1]. To give an idea of scale, from the center of my house to the center of the house to the left is 130 ft.

Being able to watch/listen whenever I want as loud as I want, and have quiet mostly whenever I want [2] has definitely resulted in a calmer, happier, less stressful life.

[1] https://imgur.com/hKnTWji

[2] During spring and summer, there is a bit of lawn mower noise.

+1000 about the quiet -> less stress. It's something very few people get. Mostly just old people that get a few acres know about it.

for me, i personally find that the construction of the apartment matters a lot more than how noisy my neighbors are; I moved from a duplex in a very quiet neighborhood in sunnyvale to an apartment right under the SJC flight path, but the old place was last updated in the '60s and had single-pane windows, while the new place was built in the '80s and upgraded pretty significantly in the aughts. It is rare that I hear noises loud enough to notice over a running fan or air purifier when the windows are all buttoned up.

Double/triple pane windows make a huge difference (as does offset studs drywall standoffs)

I agree but unfortunately in my experience the opposite is true in Texas - newer construction usually has thinner walls with less dampening between dwellings. Windows are usually fine though.

Huh. that's an interesting point I hadn't thought of; I always attributed the difference in quality to just, you know, the stricter housing code and better building tech in general... but that's not the only factor at work in Silicon Valley.

In Silicon Valley, sure, most of the housing stock was built rather a long time ago, yes, but it was also built to the expectations of people who didn't make a lot of money. The newer stuff around here is built for people who are in the top 5% or better of incomes, so it's likely they use more expensive construction techniques, too.

I'm living in a newer building in SF, and while it's not like the walls are paper thin, the construction is still lacking in many respects, especially ventilation (toxic levels of anything airborne travel from apartment to apartment) and floor-to-floor noise isolation.

These are some of the many reasons that I'll never voluntarily live in a shared-wall apartment or townhouse again. People coming and going, dogs barking, couples fighting or having loud sex (or both at the same time), bass music from the ghetto-cruisers in the parking lot, and TVs, TVs, TVs! No way, never again. Unless I fall into total financial ruin, for me it's single family home, ideally with lots of space and vegetation between my next-door neighbors.

It sucks that this kind of housing just isn't getting built anymore, even in my almost entirely suburban town. Buyers who want this kind of housing and lifestyle need to settle for older and older homes. When was the last time a single family home was built that's not the same footprint as the lot size? 1990? All that's going up around me are those so-called "luxury" 3-story condos, stacked up and mashed together on tiny lots. That's probably what is most profitable for developers, so who can blame them? There just don't seem to be enough of us in the market for peace and quiet.

What's stopping your from buying a lot and then hiring a contractor to build a house on it?

Why not using an ultrasonic bark control device?

I started using a bark control collar with one of my dogs, after a neighbour complained when my dog barked too much one afternoon when it was left alone at home.

So, now, as soon as it's on, she never barks (as she learned how it works), which is helpful when I need to go several hours leaving her alone. Never had another complaint.

I haven't tried the ultrasonic ones, as the other dog never barks, so I thought it would have been unfair to have both "punished" because of one.

But I guess in your case it would have been really useful.

The dogs are not the problem - the people are. Your dislike of dogs should be more a dislike of freckless pet owners. It's the same with some special birdies in aviary. They can drive you nuts because they don't belong to this environment. It's mostly not the animals but the owners who are the cause of the problem.

This is just the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument, but with dogs.

Of course if every dog owner was perfect then we wouldn't have problems with dogs, but you will never get everyone to be perfect, it's a losing battle, wether they be gun or dog owners.

I'm willing to bet that 99% of dog owners around me are responsible, but whetever percentage of dog owners are not responsible are the cause of all the shit that coats the pavements of my town.

we need to ban assault dogs, and close the dog-show loophole! :P

> ban assault dogs

Unironically, yeah.

This is a strawman argument and simply not relevant. Dogs are animals, and therefore they cannot have "fault" in the philiosophical sense. By the way, it is funny how the same people then go on to anthropomorphize dogs, as "loving" and so on. The point is that dogs can be dangerous, or annoying, and irrespective of any fault should be removed or banned in certain circumstances, just to remove the annoyance, not to punish anyone or anything. And it has also nothing to do with idiot owners. The owner can be the most responsible (most aren't), that's simply no help, if e.g. the walls are to thin, or if the neighbor has a lower noise threshold. The luxury hobby of keeping loud carnivores should simply not take precedence over the neighbors' need for silence.

Aren't people animals too?

When I was in a similar situation I ended up paying for a few hundred dollars worth of acoustic foam for the walls. It didn’t stop everything, especially stopping noise from upstairs neighbors, but it was still a huge help.

It’s unsightly though. The kinds that are actually nice to look at as wall decoration are super expensive.

Did you do a before and after dB measurement? I'm curious on quantitatively how well it worked as I was thinking of doing the same thing but I talked to a few musician buddies and read many things like https://acousticalsolutions.com/how-to-soundproof-acoustic-f... & https://soundproofcentral.com/soundproof-foam/ and all seem to agree foam stuck on a wall is for echo not soundproofing so didn't try it out. Also many reported that things like mass loaded Vinyl on it's own isn't that great either. It seems that on top of foam panels on the wall in a sandwich fashion is the best but that was too much cost for me to try.

I didn’t measure it unfortunately. It definitely didn’t stop everything, I could still hear a lot of stuff, but it just dulled it enough that it was easier to tune out.

I think most of the sound was actually echoing through the ductwork and leaking past gaps in the doors rather than going through party walls so if it was actually possible I’d try to get in there.

Ideally though, the soundproofing needs to happen in the room where the sound is happening rather than in your space. The building I’m in now reserves the right to require you to put rugs down if your neighbors complain. When I got a dog I put a bunch down so the downstairs neighbors didn’t have to deal with the constant patter of his feet.

Yes - foam will damp higher frequencies, but do nothing at all for bass. The only way to eliminate bass is with a combination of mass - multiple layers of Rock Wool, Roxul, and such - with air gaps and some extra stand-off damping.

It's usually possible to make a positive difference, but if it's a serious problem a workable fix - better, but not perfect - will eat up a lot of room space.

The real problem is that most apartments and houses are built cheaply and building codes for acoustic isolation aren't nearly aggressive enough. They seem to stop at the level which makes conversations hard to hear, which isn't much help when people have TVs and/or subwoofers.

My flat in Stockholm, Sweden was built within the last year, the landlord cheaped out on things like stoves but the damn walls are THICK. Maybe it’s necessary for our winters, but it really gets it quiet. Also cellphone coverage is near zero away from the windows. I guess it’s quiet in multiple spectra.

Apparently a vacuum or a void filled with Helium even a small one will stop sound. Probably impractical but it's an interesting idea.

I imagine the sound of a compressor would outweigh the noise :-)

Real-estate agents know they can light up the churn-rate in a neighborhood by just moving in one neighbors-from-hell family as it is a self-reinforcing process. This is the reverse of gentrification.

Fanning these waves of uplift and deterioration at the right frequency is what brings home the bacon.

I use Howard Leight’s Max every night during sleep to keep my sanity.

As blunte pointed out[1], earplugs make the situation worse.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237273

what about bose sleepbuds?

That's not a general-purpose argument against earplugs, as some people have noise problems in the frequency that they do block out (this was the case for me)

I used to sleep with earplugs very nicely until I got an ear infection and the doctor told me to lay off them.

So I bought a bluetooth speaker that can play files off a SD card, and loaded it up with a 1 hour rain sounds file and play that in a loop as white noise when I sleep.

Feels better as my brain can focus on the soothing sounds of the rain instead of the thoughts that sometimes creep up in the silence of the earplugs.

You should throw away the earplugs every few days. Or, you could use soft silicone putty earplugs, and sterilize them during the day.

how do you sterilize them?

Rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol works.

would peroxide work?

I did exchange them often, that's not the problem. The problem is with earpulgs in summer moisture accumulates in your ear canal and with the lack of oxygen bacteria thrives inside.

Damn, I was worried this might be a thing. No issues yet but coming on two years of daily use... might be time to look for some alternatives.

Check out the ambience apps. It's doing this, but very customizable!

On the other hand, a memory card won't start skipping at 10PM when the kids downstairs start playing with their $10 aliexpress quadcopter that barfs theoretically highly illegal quantities of RF all over 2.4GHz.

Ditto for $2 aliexpress chargers and their gaggle of $20 whitelabeled progeny on amazon.

Fair. I haven't faced that oddly specific situation :).

I use an air filter for white noise. I breath better too.

I use this free software application on my phone at night: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mcxa.softsound/ F-Droid also has another app called Noice which is more modern and has more features&sounds, but I prefer the sound samples in this one.

I just put the phone in the charger in my bedroom and turn up the volume a bit, though I am considering getting speakers since the rain sound doesn't sound 100% perfect through the phone speakers.

I use a mix of storm@100%, rain @90%, and wind+fire at 70-80%.

I don't have an issue with loud neighbours, but it helps to fall asleep and makes a daily routine which also helps with falling asleep fast.

I grew up sleeping with a humidifier first in my room and then just some kind of noisy fan. Nowadays I use a Marpac sound machine, like you see in doctors offices sometimes. Kind of a quirky habit but silence feels so... deafening.

Sometimes the "noise" is not heard but felt due to poor dampening of the structures and inferior - if any in the first place - sound proofing.

You feel the sharp slamming of the doors, stairway exits and other household "noise" - as the tremors travel along the length and breadth of the structure - all the way in your living quarters.

With audible noise you can atleast wear earplugs / use noise cancelling devices. With those tremors theres no escaping them. You feel your walls and floors tremble and its a great nuisance.

I can't believe there are no laws on the books that require builders to use vibration-dampening, sound-proofing materials / buffers for even newly constructed apartment buildings !!

I mean none of this is exactly new. Noisome and insensitive neighbors are dime a dozen.

> You feel the sharp slamming of the doors, stairway exits and other household "noise" - as the tremors travel along the length and breadth of the structure - all the way in your living quarters.

For the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster so much this. So far as I can tell, my neighbors barely make an audible sound. But the continual slamming doors, closing drawers, heavy walking, rolling of chairs, clomping up and down the building stairs...all of it comes straight into my unit and reverberates like the lowest string of a bass guitar and sets me on edge.

I'm slowly getting used to it--mostly by telling myself that they can't hear what they're doing, they're not doing it intentionally, and I'm sure I make the same sounds--but it's super hard because it's very distracting to me.

I've been in numerous poorly built apartments and the only effective way I ever found to mask doors/cabinets slamming, footsteps etc. was with a portable hose AC unit. The compressor was loud and generated a nice masking low frequency tone making it harder to hear that nonsense. It took a week to adjust to the sound, but after that it was quite soothing. Of course this isn't actually solving anything, it's just driving up the noise floor for low frequency and contributing to making everything louder.

Unfortunately they're heavy, woefully inefficient, and quite expensive to run.

I later moved into a newly built "luxury" apartment where the neighbors garage was directly under my bedroom. I figured as long as I got a decent neighbor it wouldn't be too bad. Struck out and got someone underemployed driving a 2 fast 2 furious civic with custom exhaust. Shook the entire building every night between 12 and 4 AM. No way to mask that. Lesson learned.

Top floor always, corner if you can, never directly above or next to a garage. Only exception is if the building is made out of concrete, which is exceptionally rare and will cost more. More expensive place the better -- you have a (slightly) higher chance of getting next to working professionals and quiet families.

I'm in a similar situation, the parking garage for my block of apartments is rigght under my bedroom. It's not too bad, except for one neighbour's motorcycle, where he is obviously using a modified exhaust to be louder. In the winter he likes to leave the engine to warm up for about 5 minutes every morning at 7am...

if you care, you might talk to building management about this. I also live in a building with a garage and there is a very strict "no idling" rule. it's bad to have unnecessary CO emissions in a somewhat enclosed area in the first place, but it can also set off the detector and then everyone has to evacuate the building.

They’re great. But the sound of my own heart beat is annoying. And I’m worried about if I’d hear the smoke alarm.

"But the sound of my own heart beat is annoying" I just realized how ridiculous that sounds. I am moaning that I am alive!

They are the best earplugs! I have tried loads of other brands and none compare.

When earplugs are not an option (or insufficient) I've found a pair of sleep headphones have been helpful in combination with a noise app, such as the Cozyphones shown here: (halfway down the page)

https://www.audiophileon.com/news/best-headphones-for-sleepi...

> And the thing with TVs is that the most irritating sound frequency they emit is the one that is barely audible when you're in the same room, but when you are in the next room and trying to sleep it is the main frequency that you hear.

Are you talking about the low-frequency burbling? I have windows that face the street and used to have a sleep disorder that made me more sensitive to noise, and when I'd occasionally sleep in the living room I'd get woken up in the morning by this emanating from my neighbor's apt.

> All of that made me miserable. There were actually moments when this situation triggered suicidal thoughts.

I feel you 100%,its really hard to describe how life-destroying consistent lack of sleep is. Earplugs worked wonders for me (along with the longer term solution of fixing my disorder, but that's not relevant here).

Could also be an issue with speaker placement. Most flat panel TVs have a speaker pointing down or backwards at the wall due to small bezel flat screen design.

I wonder how much of the TV problem comes down to the plague of audio engineers creating tracks that you have to turn the volume up on to hear the quite parts? I always need to have my TV at a higher volume than necessary to deal with this. "Silicon Valley's empathy problem" has been a meme for a while now but with awful sound leveling and stuff like not seeing the battle of Winterfell because of how I "tuned my TV" it seems creators are increasingly out of touch with consumers.

And then there's the ads at a higher volume.

> Then there are dogs whose owners don't seem to realize that dogs need to be walked and otherwise they will bark without end.

FWIW, the problem is not always a lack of walking. One of my dogs developed separation anxiety after I left for two weeks, and began howling in his crate. (We train dogs and are fixing the underlying anxiety with training. Bark collars can be effective at fixing the symptom.)

As someone who lives in an apartment building close to several bars, a simple white noise app did wonders for my sleep. I just leave it on a mix of sounds I find soothing, and it hides most of the noise that would keep me awake.

If the noises aren't too loud, a noise machine can help. I have one on 24/7 and most of the sounds that were irritating me before now get drowned in the noise and I don't even notice them.

Perhaps you could also add more natural sounds such as wind, rain or sea-waves.

Which make and model do you have?

Earplugs and a white noise app!

As blunte pointed out[1], earplugs make the situation worse.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237273

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