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Comment by Triphibian | Hacker News Reader

I had an obnoxious neighbor with a tv on his back porch who would watch Love is Blind so loud I could hear it throughout my house. Was kind of hoping this would be about that.

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Back in the day when I used to live in a multi-apartment building someone was being so loud as to wake me up in the middle of the night and I could never figure out who it was. It was an old building so the noise would transfer across many floors/walls. I was trying to come up with an engineering solution to this but in the mean time I got a new job and had to move anyway. Probably a microphone array would work to triangulate the source, but it would also be hard to explain to the police.

> Probably a microphone array would work to triangulate the source

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo

Go low-tech: call 911, report a noise complaint, and then the police locate the source :-D

Then they come straight to your door for your statement.

Learning to sleep with ear plugs in was the best investment of time I've ever made. Of course they don't totally kill out the sound but they lower it down by enough dB that you can comfortably ignore it, it takes piercing annoying noises and drowns them down to an ignorable level.

Agreed!

Good earplugs (like Mac's Earplugs) will (almost) completely eliminate the higher pitches. There's not a lot that one can do about lower pitches, but a white noise machine can help (either a dedicated white noise machine, or a small fan, etc).

But yeah - I grew up with quiet nights and it was a challenge to live in a dorm. Earplugs for the win! :)

Hypothetically you could talk to all your neighbors. But I understand the tradition is only communicate with apartment neighbors with percussive modes of communication (I.e. pounding on the wall).

I recently had a fire alarm with a failing battery and their way of telling you about the battery problem is a single loud warning beep every 70 or so seconds (something irregular of course), just enough to wake you up to an entirely silent room. Battery voltage was right on the edge and the detection circuit hopelessly naive so it would generally only beep at night when temperatures fell, often not even repeatedly. Horrible product.

I was hoping for a program that listens for dog barking and writes a timestamp log of every segment of active barking. Once you collect a couple weeks of data you can send it to the county.

The neighborhood was .3 acre lots with houses crammed fence to fence. We were on top of each other. The outdoor tv was a HUGE dick move that is becoming more and more accepted.

Not accepted, but because ACAB, what can we do?

I'd love to plug up all the noisy exhaust systems on every car and truck around me, but then I'd get in trouble despite ordinances basically saying, "maintain your exhaust system as to not be disturbing to others."

If cops aren't going to enforce this and citizens aren't allowed to, then what?

I don't know, snitches do get stitches after all. But writing software just to do snitching on a massive, analytical scale does fit the nerd stereotype though.

> could hear it throughout my house

Got to love American built homes that have poor or non-existent insulation.

I blame NIMBYism, at least for older multi-family. (Shoddy SFH with poor noise insulation is a different story.) If zoning were more relaxed, we would be tearing down 100+ year old multifamily in places like Massachusetts and putting in new homes with modern sound proofing between tenants.

Based on empirical data, new buildings, as they relate to multifamily dwellings, have little to no sound insulation. Older buildings are probably better in that regard.

Link?

Try Amsterdam.

Simple solution: figure out which episode they were on and play the next episode even louder.

Also it's a fantastic show.

> fantastic show

More like a fantastic show for rotting your brain. Just like any other "reality" show out there.

I was hoping it was about some tech to triangulate coordinates of illegal fireworks or gunfire. My wife has PTSD and our neighborhood has become almost unlivable because of illegal commercial grade fireworks year round.

Is there any tech that reliably tell the difference between fireworks and gunfire?

I live in a neighborhood where the question has come up a few times.

By ear, fireworks is regular in a way that gunfire is not.

Supersonic rounds make a distinctive noise that machines could reliably distinguish from fireworks (humans can learn to do this too). But distinguishing arbitrary subsonic ammo vs. arbitrary fireworks seems like it would be at least an order of magnitude harder & I don't think it could be made 100% reliable

If shotspotter[1] is anything to go by, doing this sort of stuff accurately is non trivial.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShotSpotter#Accuracy

That's not a problem here, though. You're not after recognition accuracy, like, telling apart gunshots, fireworks and car engine backfires. You're after accurate positioning and timestamping of any noise source above some loudness threshold. That should be much, much simpler.

Yeah, I don't like the terminology here either. Noisy => something that causes electrical or acoustic interference. Not something that uses too many resources.

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