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Comment by unsupp0rted | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't they just make the car blare non-stop alternating sirens for 10 minutes at a time, 4 times an hour for 12 hours, loud enough to get through drywall and double-paned windows, at the slightest perturbation?

Although I don't own a car, I'm happy when I hear throughout the day and night that my neighbor's cars are well protected.

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I've come pretty close to keying "FIX YOUR ALARM" into people's doors for this. In the end left them notes about it, which did result in it getting fixed, so I haven't had to actually do it. Someday, though.

I still think car alarms are a net negative to society. Thousands of hours of disrupted sleep and it prevents approximately no thefts.

Not to mention all of the mockingbirds that have learned the song of the car alarm. It's the most complex birdsong out there, so many mockingbirds picked it up while it was regularly sung, and now it's passed down from each generation to the next.

We had that in the 90's and 00's, cars still got stolen

I lived in Chicago at that time, you heard those car alarms constantly and they were just ignored. I still remember the sequence of beeps, whoops, and buzzers of the popular alarms.

For the device in TFA, I don't see what prevents a thief from just bypassing the thing with a jumper from the battery + terminal.

Do you remember the the birds which adapted their calls to mimic the alarm noises?

The mocking bird in my backyard knows all the car alarm sounds, it's part of his daily routine.

I guess it wasn't only me who mentally associated that sound with "uh oh someone's car was hit by a small branch carried by the wind" and/or "a cat walked over the car".

This approach is not mischief proof and will become an easy way to get back at the owners and/or your neighbors.

All a thief has to do is trigger enough false alarms (directly or indirectly) to annoy you and the neighborhood that you either disable it or learn to ignore it as false alarm.

I think it was sarcasm.

It's a travesty that's legal.

It also conveniently doubles as a fireworks detector!

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