Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down | Hacker News Reader

Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

idiallo.com

844 pointsfirefoxd368 comments

Reminds of a neighbor I had back when I was renting in a big city. He didn’t seem to understand what’s wrong with keeping his TV on for very long periods broadcasting the sleaziest (at least at the time) reality show on full volume.

I tried talking to him multiple times to no avail. He’d basically say “yeah I’ll pay attention no problem” but nothing changed for weeks.

Coincidentally at that time I was working morning shifts at a radio station. Those start really early so you gotta wake up at around 4am.

I decided one day to change my alarm (triggered on my Sony Vaio) from the peaceful iPhone-like tunes to System of a Down’s “Chop Suey”. I also decided to forget it on, on repeat, full volume, while leaving the apartment.

I don’t think 3 days passed before he knocked loudly at my door, moaning and complaining.

I told him: “you gotta understand, your TV was so loud I couldn’t sleep for nights on end, the old tune wouldn’t wake me up anymore. I had to change it. I’m so tired that I even forget to turn it off.

But yeah, I’ll try to pay attention to it”

This post and your comment has me thinking about STFU, posted here a couple weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649142

Is it feasible to capture and directionally pipe audio back to a rude neighbor? Seems like it could be effective.

Been around for awhile: https://www.holosonics.com

"a beam of directed ultrasound that delivers audio ten times more isolated "

ah, so this is what they used in embassy attacks

The details of the weapon still doesn't seem to be known, but probably just a matter of "when" those leak, seems to be the same as what was used in Venezuela (which Trump might confuse when he talks about it).

Latest I've seen about it: "Secret 'discombobulator' weapon was crucial to Venezuelan raid on Maduro" - https://nypost.com/2026/01/24/us-news/trump-reveals-to-the-p... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754101 | 7 days ago | 6 comments)

probably not the same company. It's a well–documented phenomenon.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/316/

I lived in an apartment with extremely thin floors. One night I needed to move the bed 5 inches away from the wall at 3am. In my room it made almost no noise and took 1 second. But, the next morning the woman below came up and complained.

I told her I heard her masturbating often and would just put my headphones on and check in 20 minutes. She said she didn't do that. I said "well, maybe you're listening to porn. All I know is I hear something".

She moved out the next day.

Oh I had one of those neighbors too, but I don't even count them in my bad noisy neighbors list.

From childhood I remember there was a guy who was blasting loud music whole day. He wouldn't stop, so one neighbour got so angry he took an axe, demolished this guy's door, took his stereo and launched it through the window, through the glass. Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side. Then he said next time he will chop him up and throw through the window. That was the end of nuisance. Police came, but all the neighbours said they didn't hear anything and the guy did it himself, must have gone insane.

I do not know in what country you live, but in the countries I lived in if you chop somebody's property you will go to jail.

But the guy did it himself. Must have gone insane.

Ignoring the entirety of the rest of this story, I desperately want to know why: "Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side." was so notable.

Because it didn't land on someone's head?

Yeah, I read this as "fortunately it didn't land on anyone and didn't damage any valuable property." (Value judgements about gardens aside...)

"The victim did it to themselves" is a famously bulletproof defense. I don't know why people don't try it more often.

This is the typical tall tale that used to travel in every neighborhood as a warning, especially to scare kids from doing some things. Kids eat up these stories. Probably doesn't work that much in the age of phones and "pics (shorts?) or it never happened".

Unfortunately, we’ve reached the era where pics and shorts are very much no longer proof. In a few minutes you could generate video of that exact scenario.

Were you each other’s only neighbours? How did that “war” not involve other people in the vicinity?

In the vicinity of obscenity?

Terracotta pie!

Based on this tall tale being the top comment, and the replies to you, I hereby request dang remove the “HN is becoming Reddit” nono from the guidelines.

https://old.reddit.com/r/nothingeverhappens

I agree. I don't understand the argument that just because people have incorrectly claimed HN is turning into reddit before, it automatically means it can never happen. I think HN has become a lot more like reddit and in some ways even worse.

> I don't understand the argument that just because people have incorrectly claimed HN is turning into reddit before, it automatically means it can never happen.

I don’t think the argument is it can never happen, but rather that at the time of writing of the guidelines it hadn’t. And that it is an argument that doesn’t advance the discussion. Complaining that HN is becoming like Reddit is one of the things which makes HN more like Reddit.

But did he get the message and start keeping the volume down?

Usually people who are that inconsiderate don’t change. Or they quickly change and then quickly change back.

Morning people are often inconsiderate to night people and let alone change they simply judge night people for not getting up at fuck you o’clock.

Usually morning people don’t change and are inconsiderate their whole lives.

Baseless accusations, because what bothers night people in the morning, bothers morning people in the night.

The only real difference is how much you care about how your actions impact the environment and people around you.

I wake up early, because I work early, I don't make any sound, my flatmate (I rent a room from the company) works late and always stays up late, they make so much noise that they keep waking me up to the point that I had to report them to the company.

It doesn't matter if you're a night or a morning person, what matters is, are you considerate or not.

Considerate people will be considerate at any time of the day, but there are a lot more checks and balances to keep the inconsiderate at bay at night (e.g. noise bylaws). They soon learn that they have to become considerate. Conversely, anything goes for the inconsiderate morning crowd.

As a collector of off kilter bigotry, I love finding new forms of it. Gave me a smile thinking about how much you must have nursed this grudge against morning people (they are a judgey holier than thou group on average). The particular group I harbor bigotry towards is car drivers with tinted front windows, which I find to display anti social behaviors as a group.

Bull shit!

I’d tell him “no worries I will pay more attention next time”.

did you not read the last line of the post?

This reminds me of this guy [1]

  My neighbor is smoking on the balcony, and smoke goes to my home with little kids. I talked with him several times, didn't help. It's his territory, so not much I can do, besides closing the doors. But at least i can use this fake smoke detector with VERY ANNOYING random buzzer. It starts buzzing when i connect to it my iPhone via BLE. Makes it not as relaxing to smoke on the balcony as it planned to be for him. I'm going to train this mofo with reinforcement learning like a fkn Pavlov Dog.

___________

1. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smokin...

it's impossible to tell who is normal in these stories.

for example, the guy can start smoking inside, and it will always smell like smoke.

or, the guy can get his own buzzer.

i've had oversensitive neighbors sit there and bang on pots all night because fireworks or construction noise.

like another comment mentioned, apartments are just built really badly. you can hear anything. which leads to friends of mine complaining about stompers, but to me, they're clearly not stomping. they're just tip-toeing around as quietly as possible. when you get people actually harassing you daily, then you figure out the difference.

if you have to set up a machine or device, then you might be the bad neighbor. this is especially true if they don't set up a machine back at you. that means they're just taking in your harassment and not escalating.

people aren't total idiots. they figure someone is messing with them for their level 15 volume and keep it lower. For anyone with a TV, try putting your volume to 15. Is is unreasonable volume? It's very hard to say who is the psychotic neighbor. I've been on both sides: neighbors that were loud but normal (maybe they had bad hearing, or worked at night), and neighbors that were oversensitive, who were petty and bought machines and devices and sprays to really hurt all of the people who lived around them.

The rule is simple IMO: whatever you’re doing, if it impacts people beyond your own sphere then you’re the problematic one.

Playing loud music, your neighbours can hear it => you’re the problem

Smoking and having the smoke pollute your neighbours air => you’re the problem

the problem is that there's oversensitive people and you actually do impact their lives by being a nurse that comes home at 3 am.

if you cook some dishes, and some oversensitive person doesn't like the smell, then you're impacting them.

it becomes not so simple, especially when you are a building manager and two people have a problem with each other. it's not always easy to figure it out.

Then you have cases like a once per year loud birthday party. That's annoying. Are you really the problem if you do that once a year?

I can hear my neighbors televisions regularly. It's annoying yet I never thought they were a problem. However, another person in the building DOES think they are a problem. Partly because they don't understand that they need to compromise because the walls are so thin. Since the sounds are annoying, do they get to stomp around all night and get revenge with machines and devices? at that point, the petty revenge is probably the problem.

and for a building manager, it's not always easy to figure out which person is the unreasonable one.

Maybe but this is not what the issue was here.

Playing loud music, tv is not acceptable. Or smoking outside that impacts others.

Is your want to do that, live alone in a forest.

Your comment impacted me, so I assume you'll post an apology for this deeply problematic behavior of yours?

Plenty of times the fault is with the apartment, etc.: if the reasonable noise of me living disrupts my neighbors, that's bad design. Different people work different shifts - I don't see why the morning person should have to hold off on a morning shower just because the plumbing wakes up their neighbor, nor why the night-shift worker should have to hold off on doing laundry just because that wakes the morning person up.

Right, I was thinking about avoidable things like playing loud music or smoking in a particular place. Obviously old building and normal usage is a different situation

> it's impossible to tell who is normal in these stories

The answer is that everyone thinks they’re the normal one. And everyone generally is normal.

I’ve objectively been a bad neighbor in the past. Early 20s me loved loud music. But late 20s me learned how to be considerate of the music volume.

I’ve also had crazy neighbors. One neighbor of mine complained constantly, immediately after moving in, that the communal laundry area light was left on, and I kept promising to try and do better. Of course, I made plenty of mistakes and often forgot to turn the light off when leaving with a full basket. One day he just took the (low powered LED) bulb away like they were his! Was I the poor neighbor wasting electricity? Was he the psychopath who thought he could forcibly control the entire apartment buildings access to light? It’s all in the story telling.

In my apartment complex,there are 3 types of lights in the community/public areas: 1. Centrally controlled lights - security team controls them from their common control room (this is also where the CCTV feeds are monitored live on TV screens) - e.g., floodlights, for pathways, lights in staircases. 2. Automatic-sensor (motion-sensor) driven lights - e.g., in elevators/lifts. 3. Manually operated lights - e.g., terrace lights, etc.

So the security team manage all the lights in the utility areas, whereas the uncommon areas (e.g., terraces; their doors usually kept locked by a bolt on the inside, because we sometimes get prowlers/intruders on the rooftops: monkeys from nearby jungle!) are operated by security or tenants/owners, on a need basis.

Of course, for smaller complexes, where a dedicated security team (or even a lone night watchman) is not feasible, it is advisable to install automatic lights on common areas (but not for stairs, etc., otherwise it is a safety risk), so this avoids altercations between users.

For inner rooms (such as a laundry area), a two-way switch setup helps - one switch in the room, and one on an accessway or way outside (preferably one of those acrylic translucent light switch (which lights up when switched on)), so it is easier to spot if it is left on.

> people aren't total idiots.

You clearly haven't met that many people.

Reminds me of that Terry Pratchett quote:

"You know how dumb the average person is? Well, statistically, 50% of people are even dumber than that."

I thought that was George Carlin.

Well, one might have stolen it from the other. Or they may have both come up with it independently.

It was definitely a quote in Discworld Noir though.

I will go insane if I read more reddit.

> Have you thought about moving into a house with no neighbors? Otherwise, have some respect for others IMO

What about the smoker having respect to the person he forces to smoke? (you can't be quick enough to close your window, the smoke has already invaded your home once you smelled it). Your rights end where my rights start. You have no right to invade my personal space with your toxic smoke

Typically it's written in the lease or apartment policies if you can/can't smoke on your balcony/porch/apartment parking lot etc. People who smoke usually look for smoke friendly places because having to get dressed, go outside, off the property, and then across the street every time you want a cigarette is miserable especially at night or in bad weather.

If the guy has to go to these passive aggressive lengths instead of going straight to the apartment management with a complaint more likely than not the smoker is allowed to smoke on his balcony.

Causing a noise disturbance and potentially impacting several neighbors at once because he doesn't like one particular neighbor doing something he signed a legal document agreeing to when he moved there is kind of silly. It's like becoming a member at a cigar lounge and then complaining when the guy in the chair next to you lights one up.

Being protected by law doesn't mean you are not harmful to others. I was just responding to that one reddit comment, he might have the right to do so, nonetheless it's very self centered

LOL, this reminds me of that iconic TBBT episode where Sheldon "trains" Penny with "positive reinforcement". ;)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qy_mIEnnlF4

In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down.

Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.

I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it.

But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\

"Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke, and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygen from a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his or her cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur."

- Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984

No smokers in my neighborhood, but people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings and often during the day. Not sure how to train them. And unfortunately, there are too many. Burning wood should be forbidden in residential areas. It’s similar to smoking in restaurants, except you can’t escape them.

My romantic views of wood smoke hit reality when I first camped in Canada's Banff-Jasper national parks, where you could buy unlimited firewood for the night for $5. Everyone bought it, it seemed. Trying to breathe downwind of a campground was a rude wakeup call. It should definitely be restricted in denser residential areas. I can't imagine some of the towns in Germany or Poland where residents depend on wood fires for heat.

Where they depend on wood for heat they are more likely to have efficient stoves that completely burn the wood. Smoke coming out of the chimney is "firing for the crows" and wasting fuel.

People should just make better fires.

A good fire doesn't release much, if any smoke. It burns it up instead.

A good woodstove is worth the money.

The stink remains even for efficient fires. Smoke is often correlated of course.

I'm in Christchurch, New Zealand which gets winter smog,. The city council enforces rules and woodburners need to meet strict emission standards. They regularly tighten the rules so that if you want a woodburner you need to replace it every 15 years or so.

But they do still smell.

The rules have radically improved the air quality here and we now get much less smog than when I was a kid.

Outright banning open fires and coal years ago made a big difference too.

I'm not sure what happens if you don't follow the rules. A neighbour can make a complaint and there will get taken seriously and I believe they have a van sometimes checking too. Although I've personally never heard of anyone actually getting caught.

>They regularly tighten the rules so that if you want a woodburner you need to replace it every 15 years or so.

What's that supposed to achieve? Also what do you do if you build your own woodburner/fireplace?

We have a very nice Jotul stove that we use occasionally during winter to supplement our minisplits (e.g. when it drops to -10C or colder overnight). I've been told it's one of the best wood stoves you can buy.

But we burn Siberian Elm wood that grows (and dies) on our property, and even when the stove is working at its best ... jeez, I feel embarrassed for how much we stink up the neighborhood. Burning elm wood is just inherently nasty in terms of the smell.

It's particularly embarrassing because a lot of neighbors use pinon in their stoves and that makes parts of the village basically like walking into a cafe with the best smelling chili you've ever eaten (while remaining outside!).

People have romantic ideas about heating with fire and burn the most awful green wood in their fireplaces, stinking up the whole neighborhood. I understand burning bad wood because you have no options -- I witnessed a chimney fire or two as a kid that resulted from burning too much wet pine -- but I cannot fathom the mindset of someone who does it recreationally.

Meanwhile my neighbor is burning wood he stacked eight years ago.

Some of it precious, too. Like black walnut.

100% agree, many people don’t realize just how harmful wood smoke is. It’s also the main source of pollution in the Bay Area during the winter. Unfortunately energy costs are high enough here that people resort to burning wood to save money, so collectively beneficial policies are likely to face resistance (understandably).

The purpleair map has been awesome to at least make the problem visible. I hope they are using it to aid enforcement on spare the air days.

The atmosphere above Christchurch, NZ tends to form layers in winter that trap the smoke and make this worse, and new fireplaces have been restricted to clean-burning log burners and dry wood by law.

It seemed like the biggest change in air quality in recent years came from the tragic earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 knocking down all the unreinforced-masonry chimneys, though.

Why would anyone burn anything but dry wood in their indoor fireplace...

Because all they have is wet wood and they want to light the fire.

If you had dry wood to hand of course you'd use that in preference.

Well, it's not the burning of the wood as such, but the lack of flue gas treatment. I too wish we had much stricter imissions rules for fires in residential areas.

I cannot fathom making this comparison.

Burning wood is acutally forbidden in many cities in France for this very reason.

> people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings

Not a problem with a properly designed HEATAS approved wood burning stove and properly seasoned beach wood.

Being daft enough to buy an inefficient, unapproved stove and/or and burn unseasoned green wood is ridiculous. Not to mention its illegal to sell small quantities of unseasoned firewood in Blighty; large amounts to season yourself are fine.

EDIT: If you disagree with the above, then get off your arse and write a rebuttal saying why! Downvoting simply because you disagree (rather than because the text doesn't add to the conversation) simply turns arguments into a popularity contest and is turning this place into another Reddit. (A statement of fact, no matter what the old HN guidelines say about Reddit).

What about a really loud fire alarm outside your house, that goes off whenever it detects even a slight amount of smoke?

Yep, you could point out that the purpose of the alarm is to notify you to close your windows, not to annoy the smoker.

I had this problem ... a smoker who would religiously sit on their patio and smoke so much that it would smoke us out of our house.

After speaking with them didn't help ... my next response was to religiously water the garden at the same time with my jet spray ...

I have amusing videos (from our CCTV) of our neighbour regularly diving for cover from an "accidental" spray of water.

"Sorry. I'm just watering our plants, sorry about that".

I wish I could say this solved it ... but the subtlety of the point that their smoking was impacting the enjoyment of our home, in the same way as my water spray was impacting his enjoyment of his garden was lost on them ...

We eventually settled it the old fashioned way. Not with pistols or swords ... but an old-fashioned chat after reporting them to the local council.

Luckily the problem is resolved ... but largely due to the threat of the Council taking action against their landlord.

The only solution is leverage ...

We had a similar problem and used to spray those air freshener sprays towards the source of the smoke whenever we noticed it. The advantage is that those sprays can travel downwards unlike other sources of smell (our neighbor lived below us). And they can be quite strong and linger. And depending on your local laws, you can't just pollute the air with anything you choose, but it's hard to argue against air freshener ("I just wanted my smoke filled balcony to smell nice!"). Whether it worked for us, no, not really, I don't think the neighbor was even sensitive to strong smells.You could hypothetically build some kind of smoke detection system that would automate this, but I think any cigarette smoke detectors won't work better on outside air than your nose.

People who smoke on the balconies of multi-unit buildings are awful people. It’d be a beautiful day but I can’t keep my windows open because there’s always somebody smoking to make my unit smell disgusting if I just want to enjoy a cool breeze going through.

Thank goodness smoking is becoming rarer here and is no banned pretty much everywhere indoors and near entrances.

I don’t mind if people have a vice (I’ve got mine) but keep me out of it.

Smoking tobacco got rarer here, but smoking marijuana has gotten much more common. I don't know if it's just that I grew up with tobacco, but the skunk-like smell of marijuana bothers me a lot more.

I didn’t even mention tobacco specifically because it’s the same either way.

It makes me a little sad to see a lot of peoples comments here about how they're annoyed by xyz thing someone does that doesn't stop at there fence line or unit. So many are being downvoted.

XYZ thing? ... No it's not XYZ thing. It's smoke which directly impacts the health of my family and the enjoyment of our home.

Want to cancer yourself and stink to high heaven? Absolutely 100% fine by me.

Just don't drag anyone else into it.

Reminds me of Amelie's revenge in the movie.

Ugh, this reminds me of a neighbor of a family member. They have a backyard, and sometimes, it is pleasurable to sit, grill, bbq, etc. in a backyard, particularly in the summer months. You know, normal suburban stuff.

The neighbor has some sort of device that emits extremely loud, extremely high-pitched (but not ultrasonic; or at least, not exclusively ultrasonic) noise. The family member thinks its some sort of anti-rodent thing. Whatever that means in suburbia, as there are, of course, nigh-endless squirrels, rabbits, birds, etc. all over the place. The yards are all fenced, so probably no deer at least in the back yards.

But it is absolutely annoying to just get what amounts to a DoS attack on your ears when you're trying to have a pleasant conversation with someone in the sun.

Of course, the elders in the family hear nothing, and the pitch is truly that high, that yeah, older people might not still have hearing in that range. "Unfortunately" for me, I still have ears.

Those devices are specifically designed to ward off young people. It's not an anti-rodent thing, it's a "get off my lawn" thing.

If you were to disable the speaker, they would probably never notice...

my mother's neighbor had in garden this anti-mole device, quite annoying to hear this frequent high pitched sound in regular intervals, maybe talk with neighbor about other ways how to get rid off moles

My neighbors -- 50somethings -- had one. Drove me absolutely insane, as the noise emitted was so loud it hurt my hears. I talked to them, explaining the issue. They turned it off.

YMMV...

These are commercially produced as teenager deterrents to "prevent loitering" (whatever that means).

Not saying it's right for everyone, but I moved off-grid where my nearest neighbor is 5km away.

20 years in an apartment in the city was enough for me, as I grew older I realized there are too many things outside of my control if I want silence and peace of mind.

Sound pollution is a very real baseline stressor.

I'm sure it depends on demographic/country etc, but I've lived in Apartments where everyone was considerate, no loud neighbours, no smokers. Everyone just peacefully co-existed. (I've also experienced the opposite, and unfortunately, it is more common.)

And I've lived in apartments designed to be much more sound proof, then the neighbors could do whatever they wanted and didn't have tip-toe around each other.

This is the way. I was a great neighbor, back when I lived somewhere with concrete walls between the units. Also, db meters on ebay are great peace of mind. Mount one on your wall and find out how loud is loud enough to be heard.

All it takes is one good neighbor moving out and a bad one moving in next door…

Exactly. 8-9 people out of 10 are just fine. 1-2 out of 10 (likelihood multiplied by the number of shared walls/ceilings/floors you have) are enough to never want to share a wall/ceiling/floor again.

I'd feel a bit too lonely at 5km distance to the nearest neighbor as a matter of fact I don't think I ever visited or stayed at such a property. Are you completely off grid? What are the drawbacks of living in such a place and is it overall a better deal for you? It sounds very tempting for me too but I don't think I'm ready for this just yet.

I have no electricity except solar. It works well for all my needs, technology has solved this depending on your needs and how much money you have.

I have no water except the one I bring when I buy food weekly/every two weeks. I'm still renovating/building so I'll have a well in the future.

I heat my home with wood that I cut on my own property, I enjoy this very much. It's a workout that also produces something of value.

The drawbacks can be many depending on what kind of lifestyle you're after.

Sartre said "if you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company".

I do mountain biking, nordic skating and I have a dog; it works for me. A lady friend might be nice eventually :]

It's silent, I can hear my own heartbeat; civilization is 30 min away.

This is in Sweden.

Before your last sentence I thought, "wow this person is some kind of space alien." But as soon as you said "this is in Sweden," I understood you completely. I don't know what that says about me or Sweden. But it all clicked into place.

Maybe because you remember that statistic about single person households from a couple of days ago, I think Sweden was 3rd place globally? Though it's also a very happy country statistically, maybe something about the geography and upbringing which make that work better than in countries with comparable numbers but worse results (e.g. Germany or Netherlands)...

Yes you kind of feel like an extraterrestrial living like this, which could be another drawback.

I find comfort in these quotes however:

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

and…

“I look crazy but I'm not. And the funny thing is that other people don't look crazy but they are.” — eden ahbez

I live in a similar place, though I'm not off-grid.

The drawbacks for me are that "town" is about an hour away. But amazon delivers here.

There's no city life, no ordering to-go food or pizza, no movie theater, no ice cream runs to sonic. You have to plan ahead. Socialization happens online or with people in your own home, pretty much exclusively.

It's often hard to find anyone to fix your stuff--you become a framer, a plumber, a roofer, a mechanic. I consider this a net benefit, but it can be taxing at times.

That being said, not everyone does it quite like I do. All my neighbors have jobs in the city, for instance.

I can relate to this very much. A city guy, no one could understand my (also) 20 years of complaining about neighbors with loud music, slamming doors, making noise after midnight, etc etc. I lived on top floors, and I even spent a fortune living in a luxury building that was newly built, hoping sound insulation was higher end. The problem is that bass music travels through everything. I suffered from being woken up in the night by party goers, and early morning by door slammers. Once I wake up, it takes me a long time to fall back asleep. On weekends, when I want to stay at home and just play a game or read, people play music in the afternoon and often I would stress over some sort of party nearby beginning that evening, forcing me to find somewhere to go just to avoid the noise. Eventually I purchased a home in the woods.

What's happening to make us a minority here is at the minimum:

- Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be

- Some people are light sleepers as well as get cognitively overloaded, needing relatively quiet environments to relax. People like me are in a tiny minority.

- Cities are the future, they're the greener option, and you're supposed to prefer the dense apartment life instead of the car one, on ethical grounds.

So when I detailed my suffering several times here on HN, and suggested dense cities are not mentally healthy for many people such as myself, I got downvoted. There's a bit of politics behind city living that folks who don't have cognitive sensitivities around noise just won't relent from.

> - Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be

When I was younger I lived in a large shared house, constant activity and people coming and going, music always playing, I loved it then.

Now I live in a very soundproof apartment, literally never hear anyone else (our neighbours right next door had a party until 4am with loud music, etc. We didn't hear a thing). I love this now.

As I get older I've gotten more and more sensitive to other people's noise. I find people playing bluetooth devices to be acutely, intensely, irritating. I can't just ignore it, it annoys and distracts me too much.

I've become that grumpy guy who asks people to turn their music down or wear headphones (almost always a negative experience for everyone involved). I talk to management at restaurants and pubs and ask them to turn the music down (mixed results on that one). I have taken a table at restaurants and then walked away because the music is too loud.

It is weird, because this is my reaction to the situation, so I'm responsible for it. A city is not a quiet space, and we can't really expect it to be. But at the same time, the lack of consideration for others is shocking. Walking around playing music on speaker is basically saying to everyone "f*ck you, I'm more important than all of you".

>It is weird, because this is my reaction to the situation, so I'm responsible for it. A city is not a quiet space, and we can't really expect it to be. But at the same time, the lack of consideration for others is shocking. Walking around playing music on speaker is basically saying to everyone "f*ck you, I'm more important than all of you".

It's the subway/train/restaurant usage of phones to spool Tiktok/IG shorts with the sound on, and other noise, that I find maddeningly annoying.

But everything (in the US at least) is very loud, including restaurants. I don't understand why. It's far less likely to happen in W European capitals. As if Americans are extremely loud and love to be engulfed in constant noise. At least, the US and I'd say much of the Caribbean is like this as well.

Is it because we're old that we're bothered? Have things gotten worse? Did we or It change?

good question. I assume it's me, because it's my reaction. But I could be wrong

> Now I live in a very soundproof apartment, literally never hear anyone else (our neighbours right next door had a party until 4am with loud music, etc. We didn't hear a thing). I love this now.

Unless your soundproofing is thicker than the bass sound wavelength (10m+) it's not physically possible.

I know people who live in standalone houses and complain about people across the street having parties because bass vibrations come over

It's all very psychological. Good for you though

kids screaming at each other is my psychological breaking point. My sister's fully-detached, really-nice house has neighbours with post-toddler kids that enjoy screaming at each other. It doesn't bother her. It's like fingernails on a chalkboard for me

> A city is not a quiet space, and we can't really expect it to be.

Why? It’s one thing when it is completely silent – that would be absurd –but when it is full of noise pollution? Rude, loud people, constant shitty music blaring out of every spot.

Construction noise, traffic noise, conversations, people being people, etc. It's not a quiet space and we can't really expect it to be.

But I agree, that doesn't give everyone carte blanche to be a cunt.

> The problem is that bass music travels through everything.

It’s not just bass tones—low-frequency vibrations travel through everything. I live in a five-story pre-WWII building, and sometimes, when a neighbor runs their washing machine early on a Saturday morning, I don’t even hear the spin cycle. I just feel it, lying in bed trying to squeeze in a little more sleep. It’s an odd sensation, not painful, but definitely not pleasant.

Can’t they put those damper things?

There are a few topics that illicit this kind of response. I've lived in apartments/condos ever since I moved out of my parents' home, and living through Covid in an apartment was the nail in the coffin. My wife and I decided we would not live in a shared building again - at minimum, we'd only look for places that have a private entrance.

Based on the behavior of real estate in our area (high density suburbs of NYC), I don't think we're the only ones? Condo prices have either fallen or remained static while SFH have skyrocketed.

I also can't stand noise and in my case the solution was to find a two storey apartment at the top floors. They're fairly common in my city.

Another thing that happened by itself was my neighbour with whom I shared several walls moving out. His landlord put the apartment up for sale, but a year later there are still no takers.

I'm seriously considering buying it if only to keep it empty and my place peaceful.

Or buy it and be able to decide who the tenant is, instead of random strangers.

> - Younger people are less sensitive to noise, go out more, and generally don't understand how distressful it can be

Nonsense. This has 100% to do with manners and how your parents taught you. When I grew up making a noise in an apartment was a grave offense, because you make a nuisance for your parents and neighbors.

> - Some people are light sleepers as well as get cognitively overloaded, needing relatively quiet environments to relax. People like me are in a tiny minority.

Double nonsense. I don’t have statistics, but given how bad modern mental health is, I don’t buy that only a tiny minority has problems with sleep.

> - Cities are the future, they're the greener option, and you're supposed to prefer the dense apartment life instead of the car one, on ethical grounds.

You should’ve started with this. I would’ve just skipped the whole message. Complete, utter nonsense.

Unless you believe in the “eat-ze-bug” future, the greener option is to:

- reproduce less

- raise living standards

- drastically increase productivity so we don’t need so many people

- AI + Space exploration

If I'd read 'AI' first instead of last, I'd have stopped reading there.

Brown noise always does the trick for me when things get noisy, and being very careful about choosing the apartment/room you rent, making sure it's at least somewhat quiet.

Unfortunately this doesn't work if you spawn your own noise polluter and they live in your house.

I cannot tolerate children crying or being generally loud.. unless it’s my kid, then it barely registers at worst, enjoyable at best.

Triple-glazed windows do work wonder. I live atm in a modern construction with triple-glazed windows everywhere. Now it's not the city per se, more like the posh suburbs, but it's still an apartment, with neighbors. But you don't hear them, nor do you hear the cars outside.

That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority complex and he's expressing it by playing though in the way he writes.

> You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way.

Sure you do. Punishment of bad behavior is a basic social rule. Words were exchanged. All they had to do was listen, understand and stop the bad behavior. Had they done that, things would not have escalated beyond a polite conversation. Unfortunately, people often choose overt disrespect instead. They choose to challenge the other guy to do something about it.

If anything they should be glad the punishment was as civilized as this. There are many places in this world where it could easily escalate to actual violence.

> If anything they should be glad the punishment was as civilized as this. There are many places in this world where it could easily escalate to actual violence.

Agreed. But there’s a reason that guy apparently felt no worries about closing the door in OP’s face. Perhaps the likelihood of it escalating was slim. And there’s a reason why OP didn’t knock again.

In the resolution you propose in another comment, deviance doesn’t cease. It transfers to the guy who thinks he can correct people’s behavior with technology. But I need to remind myself where I’m saying this at.

> Perhaps the likelihood of it escalating was slim.

Not as slim as he had hoped.

People feel free to close the door on others because they are used to a life without violence. Their implicit thinking is "I'm not even gonna consider what this other person wants because what's he gonna do about it? Nothing." They think there is no way they will be held accountable for their actions. That's magical thinking.

People really shouldn't ask that question. There are a lot of things that can be done about virtually any situation. People would do well not to forget that.

"What are you going to do about it?" is a challenge. It's refusal to negotiate and a direct challenge to escalate the situation. "If this matters so much to you, then you had better do something about it". Not only does it escalate, it insults the other person. They have no choice but to escalate because the alternative is to be seen as weak which costs respect, especially if the exchange happens in front of peers.

> It transfers to the guy who thinks he can correct people’s behavior with technology.

Yes. The situation has escalated. The other person can either submit or escalate even further. Perhaps into physical violence.

Hope the hacker has a gun and is able and willing to use it. You know. Just in case. Plenty of people out there willing to die over real or perceived slights.

Who hurt you?

That’s how things are done in Eastern/South hemispheres. There’s a lot of things about respect from those parts of the world that Westeners don’t understand.

> But there’s a reason that guy apparently felt no worries about closing the door in OP’s face. Perhaps the likelihood of it escalating was slim. And there’s a reason why OP didn’t knock again.

Most likely because they’re entitled westerner who grew up with laws that protect against physical violence, but not mental abuse.

Humans are more complex than that. If they become aware that someone is applying such conditioning, they will defy it.

For the same reason corporal punishment doesn't work even on an average intelligence child. They quickly figure out that probability of getting punished again is not 100% and even if, that's just cost of doing business - sometimes it's worth it.

It's not complex at all. It's just violence. People are doing things you don't want them to do, so you do something to make them stop. Pretty standard.

If they can muster defiance, it's only because you weren't violent enough. If someone is defiant enough to play probability games with you, just punish them 100% of the time instead, even if they did nothing. He was probably doing it some other time where you didn't catch him, so it's warranted.

There's always someone willing to escalate things further. Things will escalate until someone discovers their limits and backs down. Consequences range from being quietly hated, to being ostracized, to being actively fucked with, to being beaten up, to being straight up killed.

Smart people don't fuck around and find out. They check their behavior so that they don't step on other people's toes for no reason. Violence very often comes with instructions on how to avoid it. Don't do this, and I won't do that. All they have to do is listen and follow the instructions.

The outcome where the obnoxious neighbor learns his lesson and stops his bad behavior is the good ending. The behavior stops, the situation de-escalates and peace is restored. If they keep up their defiance, things will only keep escalating further. Somebody could get hurt.

But don't you see that if you solve your problems this way, the obnoxious neighbour can also solve their problem this way?

"Stop making a noise or I'll beat you up"

"Quit complaining about the noise or I'll beat you up"

Your position just means every disagreement comes down to a physical fight. Is that how you want to live?

Willingness to use violence to get what you want is not inherently linked to being in the right.

> Smart people don't fuck around and find out.

Of course they do. Some of the smartest people out there are habitual risk takers. We wouldn't have organised crime if it weren't for people smart enough to not get caught or killed early on.

Your method doesn't take into account that the person you're targeting also has a brain and they will use it against you and also that they have as much power as you do.

Overall you're describing a power fantasy, not reality.

He might have, and my experience is that you cannot teach inconsiderate people, they lack social object permanence: as soon as you don't stand in front of them, they become unaware of your existence and thus are also unaware that their music at two in the morning might be annoying to you.

Better windows don't help either - but they're great for noise outside. The only thing that helps against horrible neighbors is moving. If you've never learned that lesson, you've never had horrible neighbors.

"The only thing that helps against horrible neighbors is moving. If you've never learned that lesson, you've never had horrible neighbors."

Having lived next to a terrible neighbour for over 20 years, I can confirm a horrible neighbour never changes into a considerate one. And often they're the ones that never sell or move (why would they, they're having a great time..). Almost all the neighbours properties around here have been sold a few times, but not him.

Lucky we've been lucky with our other neighbours who are (currently, and most of the owners of the past too) all very nice people.

We'd love to move, but we really like the location, house and garden. That and anything similar is priced out of our range.

We used to think we got really lucky with the price of our place, but maybe no one bought it because they knew the neighbour that lived there.

But yeah, if you can move, move. Don't hang around hoping things will get better, they usually don't.

I stood my ground once against an awful neighbor. The neighborhood was a fishbowl and he already had a bad reputation that he wanted to pretend didn’t exist. My spouse and I put up a fence on the property line and nowhere else, which really embarrassed him. And at one point we figured out he was eavesdropping on us. I found out he had a record and so I started talking with my spouse in the room he eavesdropped on about getting a restraining order and about his record. It took about 3 months but he eventually packed up and left.

There's a guy in my neighborhood driving a 20yo BMW with a modified exhaust. He also has a motorcycle. If I tried to move to a more expensive area, I would have a guy driving a 5yo BMW with a modified exhaust - the building two blocks away is literally that - 40% more expensive, asshole in an M3 flooring it every time he drives out.

A friend of mine had a prolonged conflict with a neighbour who lived off of his dad's money and who would pound his Porsche at any time he would feel like it.

What part of California or Washington are you in?

I think we can join our hands in a big circle including all nations of the world and together sing how this is a worldwide phenomenon.

Anyway Poland, but not even Poland, ME - just Poland.

I actually had that too, but they don't stop sounds from inside the building like constant bathroom renovations etc.

The problem is also that the moment you walk outside you're bombarded with all the sounds of the city. ANC headphones exist but so do air-pollution masks, I don't think that's the way forward or at least that's not how I want to live my life.

> That said TFA's author is a real dick and that is seen in the way he writes. You don't "teach" your neighbors and you don't program them in a pavlovian way. He obviously has got an inferiority

Sure you do, if:

1) your neighbour is an absolute cunt

2) their parents failed to raise a responsible human being

3) law won’t protect you

4) you can’t easily move

5) you don’t use violence

Then you have all the rights to teach the cunt some manners.

I love to be in control of my environment. In my apartment block that means I rely on my sound machine to silence any unwanted noise. Albeit relatively.

I had a neighbor who mounted his TV directly on the shared wall to my bedroom in violation of the lease terms. The wall was hollow and seemed to not only conduct the sound into my bedroom but act as a natural amplifier. I offered him a nice speaker system I wasn't using but he said he didn't know how to connect it to the TV. I offered to do it for him but he refused. I offered to pay a professional and he still refused. I was forced to move my bed into the living room so I could sleep through the night as he started his day by watching the news at full blast at 3am.

Naturally, in response I propped those speakers to the same wall and played whale calls at a low volume any time I wasn't home.

> We had interference somehow. Our remotes were set up to operate at the same frequency. Each remote controlled both devices.

That's not "interference" in the technical sense.

Interference actually causes signal degradation, distortion, or loss.

This is the system "working as expected" technically. It was just set up wrong.

> That's not "interference" in the technical sense.

But it is "interference" in the sense that that is what the word "interfere" means.

Interestingly, the -fere in interfere comes from the Latin ferīre, meaning 'to hit', 'to strike', etc. My first guess would have been something like facere/fāre or -fer, but that quickly falls apart on reflection (to do across? between-bearer?).

Inter + ferire = to strike one another. Makes sense.

Bonus point: the aforementioned -fer ('bearer', like conifer or aquifer) is distantly related to ferīre, as it is to English to bear, Greek phérō ('to carry'), Slavic brat ('to take'), Sanskrit bhárati ('to carry'), etc. I suppose ferīre itself must be the result of semantic drift along the lines of 'to carry/bear' -> 'to bring forth [blows]' -> 'to strike/hit'.

> Inter + ferire = to strike one another. Makes sense.

I guess, but I don't really think of interfering as a mutual thing. I see interfere more like intervene or interpose, where the subject of the verb inserts himself between two other things. (As, in the example above, "my" neighbor places himself into the middle of the relationship between me and my television.)

If I'm interfering with you, it is not necessarily the case that you are also interfering with me. And it certainly couldn't be said that "we are interfering [end of sentence]" in the same way that it could be said "we are fighting".

The use of with to mark an indirect object does tend to suggest that the sense of the verb was more mutual at an earlier point, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-channel_interference

One could argue that "interference" is not entirely a objective technical definition, but also subjective w.r.t quality of the service expected.

Also, in this scenario, if the two remotes were to transmit simultaneously, it is possible both boxes could have received some mangled, unregonizable waveform due to the interference.

The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.

I mostly used it for turning volume down in waiting rooms or at bars, but a bar was also where I figured out most of their TVs tend to be set to the same control because they had a few with their sensors in a line where I was sitting and they all went off together while I was programming it.

One of the phone features I miss most, after the 3.5mm jack. Nobody needs to hear loud daytime TV in a waiting room.

My work Samsung phone also came with IR port and an app.

Third party app. Un-uninstallable

That Samsung apparently didn't pay enough coz after 3 years I had taskbar ads from that app that couldn't be removed.

Ages ago I built a tv-b-gone, and hid it inside an old car key fob. I'd carry it most places, turning off TVs as I went.

Nowadays I just use my flipper to do much the same

N900 had one too, along with an FM transmitter, just in case you wanted to override whatever generic radio station was playing at full volume in the coffee shop

In the 90s, my HP-48G graphing calculator had the same, and someone wrote a free universal remote control app for it.

I had way too much fun screwing with the TVs at school.

I did exactly the same. So many good laughs !!! :))

Just got a new OnePlus 15 last month and it has an IR blaster built in. Works great

My current phone is a (Xiaomi) POCO M4 Pro. It has both an IR port and a 3.5mm jack. It's a great device, although it doesn't support 5G.

Sometimes, when the remote is too far, I control my TV with it.

I would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.

Independent dongle, you don't need to plug it into your phone: https://www.tvbgone.com/

They do sell ir dongles for android but the reviews on amazon don't look great.

Used to do that at school with an old palm pilot. Good times.

Do you remember the watches? This was a big thing on watches for a short while in the late '90s, and the cool kids were definitely the ones who could flip the wall-mounted TV on and off when the teacher wasn't looking!

I have a TV-Be-Gone device, which is designed to disable TV’s in a certain radius. It has been an absolutely wonderful little accessory during business trips .. someone watching something obnoxious at the hotel bar? TV-Be-Gone!

A Flipper Zero would be the modern equivalent, I suppose. I like the idea of being able to turn off devices in a certain radius - but I don’t like the idea of everyone having one. Having ultimate power over the wireless noise in my immediate vicinity - awesome .. but seeing someone empty their pockets at the airport and a Flipper Zero in the inspection box - not so fun.

It’s going to be a wild and woolly future, the more these kinds of shenanigans become relevant.

There was a guy who did TV-Be-Gone chips to put into car keyfobs (certain Valeo fobs used in Rovers, Citroëns, Peugeots, Renaults, and high-end Toyotas were infrared, in the late 80s/early 90s, and the remote central locking fobs were cheaply available from your friendly neighbourhood scrappy for pennies by the late 90s).

He also did a considerably more expensive one that worked on Furbies, which "chatted" in sync using infrared, and told every Furby in the room to stop talking and go to sleep immediately.

If you had child back then, or you babysat one, you'll know why this one was his biggest seller.

It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).

RF remotes are harder to hack together but similar principle. Whether IR or RF, the codes are common across all devices of the same model/protocol.

TV-Be-Gone can work in public places, but it's is not going to work through walls for neighbors.

Can you see their window?

Pick up a cheap CCTV infrared floodlight, gut it, and gate it with Ye Olde Bloody Great MOSFET driven by your TV-Be-Gone microcontroller.

Unless you manage to aim a strong IR blaster at their window/the ceiling behind it.

Indeed. It works with infrared light, the same way most TV remotes do.

A spark gap does pretty well. But the FCC fowns on such things.

TV-B-Gone Kit:

https://github.com/adafruit/TV-B-Gone-kit

I used to use the IR blaster on my Android phones to shut off the TVs in doctor's office waiting rooms when I was the only one waiting.

I have a Concept 2 rowing machine. I've measured: it's about 65db when I'm rowing easy, 70, maybe a bit more, when I'm rowing hard.

Most times when I row, it's for half an hour or so, but it can be up to 45 minutes to an hour, or sometimes up to an hour 40, or rarely 3.5 hours (I row a marathon once or twice a year).

There are two components to the noise it makes: there's the whirr of the gear as I pull on the chain, and the rush of wind from the fan it spins.

I think the whirr is more prominent/annoying. I've carefully crafted a box to fit over the section of the rower where the gears are. That dampens the noise a great deal. There's still the opening where the chain goes in, so if anyone has ideas for that I'm happy to hear them.

I also have foam pads for the thing to rest on, in case it vibrates at the feet (I don't think it does).

At my old high-rise apartment I'd row until midnight, and no one ever complained. Now I'm in a brownstone, so I'm keeping it to before 10pm. Hopefully that's enough that I'm not a bad neighbor.

I had a very similar story related to this as well.

For the longest time I always assumed RF remotes were the ancient ones, as growing up, we had an old large Magnavox console tv, with just such a remote. As time progressed we went to IR, which was, as I'll explain below, a welcome relief!

The tv was positioned in a basement room, just under my bedroom. Every few months I would be rustled from my sleep, at 4AM, to come downstairs to the tv turned on, blaring full volume and on channel 99 (static). This continued for a while until I realized that my father, who is HAM operator, and an early riser, would somehow be injecting into the remote sensor on certain frequencies occasionally. Needless to say it was thusly unplugged afterwards!

RF chokes on the cables are sometimes necessary. The clip-on ones work well, and are cheap. Part of being a Ham is mitigating EMI your broadcasting may cause.

As a side note, intentionally jamming or interfering with other peoples signals can carry up to a $1m fine and several years in prison. =3

What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!

When I was living in Berlin, the entire apartment complex had a WhatsApp group and people would (of course it's Berlin) party a lot. People would ask each other to turn down the volume, which worked for the most part - at least for severe partying. Best messages were like "you've been partying all night, it's 2pm, I need some silence to have a meeting.

Back then I was dreaming of some shared application, people could put on their phone or laptop and then the collective could decide or at least hint through that software that the volume was up too high.

The collective has already decided that you must turn the volumn down at 10 PM.

One of the reasons why I want to move out from the city and have a house far away from everyone else. Nobody disturbing my peace. Nobody complaining about my noise.

Frogs and crickets want a word.

Having the privilege to live in a house without common walls to a neighbor is the biggest quality of life improvement I've ever had the good fortune to experience.

I'd take a hell of a long commute to the burbs' before I'd go back to dealing with b.s. like this.

Loud music, slashed tires if you called the cops, people smoking weed and cigars and stinking up the whole building, parking space shortages, drunks throwing up in the stiarwells, screaming matches between people in bad relationships, horribly maintained flats and every repair done on the cheap, 4am fire alarms, a rat problem the owners would not put money in to fix properly, the list goes on and on over the 20+ years I lived in rentals.

It reads like you lived in some third world country. In all my years living in various capitols, I've never had issues close to what you've described here.

The GP grew up poor in the US (by their own earlier statement) .. which tracks with your "some third world country" observation. The US is famously harshly tiered by wealth and privilege.

Haha I did something similar to my teebage neighbour and his Bluetooth boombox that he’d blast at midnight when his parents were away. I’d connect to his device and disconnect immediately. He also learned to turn it down after that. That was our communication channel. Every time it was too loud I’d connect and disconnect. Immediately after he’d reduce the volume to something reasonable.

Many of us have an aging neighbor whose hearing gradually worsens. The TV volume creeps up over time.

A simple, thoughtful fix is to gift them a wireless TV speaker designed for this exact problem.

The Sony SRS-LSR200 sits close to the listener, so dialogue is clear without blasting the TV for everyone else. It lets them enjoy their shows again without turning the volume knob into a neighborhood event.

There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.

And of course the Ping of Death (which I thought was windows-only, but according to the linked article also affected linux and mac).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death

why would there be irda on server ?

Bonus question is which PCs had IR ports.

Some laptops had them, and came with IR remotes. Some of the marketing was around using those laptops as "media centres", and you could control them from the sofa while it was plugged into a TV.

With line of sight too?

When I lived in a NYC studio apartment, the neighbor directly above me was a DJ and used to mix club dance music at full volume. Around then I discovered the fuse boxes for several adjacent floors were located just down the hall from me in an unlocked utility closet.

We had such a neighbour also with an extremely loud TV on nearly all the time. We eventually deduced that he was deaf. We bought him headphones for the TV with a letter explaining the issue. Problem solved.

Seems like a good reason you should need to "pair" the RF remote to the device, similar to Bluetooth. Otherwise a bad actor in an apartment complex could get a "universal" RF remote and randomly try stuff until they can control your devices.

Why? It sounds like the system is working as unintended.

It's a feature not a bug

Honestly I could see arguments going both ways. Pairing prevents unauthorized access, but at the same time, pairing means you need to be able to pair without having a paired device on-hand.

For a passive read-only device (like most satellite/cable receivers 20 years ago), it was probably more important to allow customers to easily replace their lost remotes than it was to prevent pranksters (who could often be dissuaded by more physical means).

Game console manufacturers figured this out ages ago. Press button on the console, press button on the controller, they're now paired

I hate loud neighbors. But I also am disappointed more apartments aren't built to be sound proof and that even if they are it's nearly impossible to find out if they actually are before moving in.

My good experience that told me this is possible is in 1999 I moved in to the my first apartment with a built in washer and dryer. When the agent showed me the apartment and pointed out the washer and dryer, I said something like "I guess I need to be sure not to use it too late so it won't annoy the neighbors". The agent said, "this building was originally built to be condos. Each outer wall is 6 inches of concrete with 6 inches of space between it and the next wall for the next unit. You can run the washer and dryer anytime you want, your neighbors won't hear it.

I've never been lucky enough to live in another apartment built that way. My current apartment, the neighbors are up stomping around the room and having loud conversations til 5am. I think they call family in Korea and so are up to match the time.

I haven't talked to them about it yet but I wish I just didn't have to and the apartment was designed better.

I was in a similar situation, but I fought fire with napalm. My new neighbor got one of those shitty hi-fi systems with a sub apparently and separating us was only a thin wall. Our shared landlord and authorities were both powerless to fix the problem, or just didn't care enough, so I took it in my own hands. Unfortunately to my ignorant new neighbor, there's always a bigger speaker and it just so happens that I have a touring grade PA set - I am talking tops and subs with 130+ db output power each. I placed my speakers facing our shared wall and whenever he would crank up his hi-fi, I'd put on noise cancelling headphones and blast him right back at about 20-30% volume of my system which effectively turned the wall on his side into a giant speaker. He persisted for about a week and then gave up. Then tried it again a couple of weeks later, only to quit for good. Giving them the taste of their own medicine is most effective.

That reminds me of my Xbox One. I could reliably turn it on by starting some heavy wifi traffic on my phone, typically by opening a YouTube video. The console lets you turn it on with the wireless controller, so I assume the wifi traffic was somehow recreating that signal.

I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.

I had a housemate in college who used to party until all hours, bring people back at 3AM and put on loud music. Even during exam season. I tried talking to her a couple of times but she would roll her eyes and say "sure". Never stopped though.

One evening my girlfriend was using a hair straightener in my bedroom, it tripped the central fuse and turned off the electricity. I told my GF that I would buy her a new hair straightener because this one isn't safe.

Now every time my housemate started blaring music at 3AM then I just needed to plug in the hair straightener. It only took 3 or 4 attempts for me to Pavlov my housemate into not playing loud music at 3am. :-)

I had the same problem when I was in uni. Funnily enough, the RCD switches for each block were behind a panel in the common toilets, which did not have a real lock; just a hole for a "cabinet key" (a square rod).

That sounds like a great microcontroller/decibel meter project, something that could run 24 hours a day unattended.

One problem is the risk of false positives messing up the "training"

What's the risk? You turn on the TV when it was off?

And then detect the noise and turn it back off?

That's actually where I thought the article was heading

This is the stupidest nitpick, but it's not really Pavlovian conditioning (as mentioned in the last paragraph) but rather operant conditioning. Pavlovian, or classical conditioning is the triggering of a biological response after a neutral stimulus (ring a bell before feeding each time and the dog will salivate when it hears the bell even if there's no food anywhere nearby).

Operant conditioning is where the agent learns that an action produces an outcome and learns to perform (or not perform) certain actions to get the desired outcome.

Whether stupidest nitpick or not, thank you for posting this. I learned Pavlovian conditioning better from your comment. This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. Appreciate it.

it might not be anything, but the neighbor simply yielding to every little rule in the head of another neighbor.

we haven't established that the neighbor knows whether or not someone is screwing with him.

when my building had a person like that, who played these games all day for decades, some either just ignored all of it, while others simply moved out when they could.

this is why I read hn

Thank you for realizing my ultimate power fantasy.

To be fair, it was luck that realized it. If those controls were not set to the same frequency the story would not exist.

But there are devices out there that can be tuned to any frequency. Flipper and other clones could pull this feat for example.

Yeah, but you still need luck. In reality it will not work out e.g. because their setup uses an IR control. Reminds me of:

https://xkcd.com/538/

I’d love to find a way to do something similar with neighboring dogs.

Ultrasound whistle?

Sounds a bit cruel though, I dunno how it makes them feel

Usualy doesn't work. Needs a specific type of dog, and the right device. Most of the ones sold online are scams.

It makes them bark more, in my experience.

loud thunder sound using a big sub woofer?

Funnily enough about 10 years ago, I had noisy neighbours playing music late at night and after some fruitless attempts at politely asking them to turn the sound down, I found their wifi and ran a 'deauth attack'. Effectively flooding their wifi with packets disconnecting devices. Followed by a, "fuck!"

Safe to say we got peaceful nights sleep.

Is this a felony?

Since there are people from all countries here, the answer to your question depends a lot on who you ask. I don't think even the specific word you used is relevant in all parts of the world.

Is it a felony where you live?

That term doesn't exist in the legal language where I live. And I don't know your term well enough to know what it maps to in our law.

In the United States, there's felonies and misdemeanors. Felonies are a big deal, and misdemeanors are a small deal.

Felonies carry sentences over a year, and time is served in state or federal prison, not in a local jailhouse.

No, it was self defense.

We moved into a new flat with really bad lighting and I decided to buy those "AmazeFun" (or whatever generic named CN brand) "smart" LED ceiling lights. Bought one for each of four rooms.

Installed, tested them with the app, everything works, great!

Got out the remotes since pulling out the phone to use the app every time you want to turn on the light in the room is a bit much for me. Pressed Power, boom, the whole house is powered on. Dimmer, light temperature, everything syncs between all four lights. Power off turns them all off.

Wrote to "AmazeFun" support, turns out it's "normal behavior". Right.

Fwiw, get bulbs that run something like wled. You can pair them with esp-now remotes, like the wiiz remote

https://www.athom.tech/blank-1/wled-15w-color-bulb

While we are on the topic, any idea of how I could teach the same lesson to people listening to their phone without a headset in public transports ?

Asking them is out of question most of the time, for safety reasons...

If you can hear your neighbor exclaim not too loudly, the problem is not with the neighbor but with the lack of sound isolation in the building.

Of course, that is not the landlord's problem: (

And--not defending the loud guy--but my dad is a loud guy. He's in his eighties and he can't hear shit. He watches the news at a horrendous level, sometimes the TV buzzes.

Not everyone is just an asshole.

That being said, my dad might just leave it turned up, too. He lives in his home alone, though, so I'm not sure.

This is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.

My, that sums up apartment living quite well. I'm all for densifying popular urban areas, but man, add some fucking sound isolation cheap landlords.

Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point no-one wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.

There are two kinds of issue: a solid transmission path that shouldn't exist ('bridge'), and a gap or void that shouldn't exist. What we need is something like a time domain reflectometer but for sound conduction, so you can detect gaps and bridges after screwing on the drywall but before skimming over it, and before the doors have been put in - ie, while there's still a massive audio path a few meters away. Ideally, even if the next panel hasn't been screwed on. If you had that, then if it detects something then all you have to do is unscrew a panel to fix it, which is something that people might actually do.

Anyone who has enough audio engineering skills, feel free to build this!

And get it into a modern certification. Want LEEDS? Get the sound measurement people out.

When people complain about housing prices being too high, this is what I usually point them to. There are _a lot_ of boxes to tick, some of those boxes are critical, some are not so much. Some are severely punished, some are not so much. Some have extremely high costs and are a PITA, some not so much.

This is a really good idea. Somebody build this!

The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.

Something I've seen with renovations is construction companies not understanding how to attenuate sound, and not bothering to learn or, even better, consult someone who knows.

Well meaning PMs read up on products and throw them at the problem and it's treated as a great success because there are no hard targets, just a general desire to reduce noise, and that happened.

Noise from neighbors is the biggest thing that drove me to move to a single-family home.

Ironically it was quiet enough in our previous apartment, but moving to a house we now have the neighbor using their awfully loud snow-spitting machine before 6AM after snowy nights... (And it snows a lot)

Last city I lived in had an ordinance preventing this before 8am.

A company I worked for had to abide by it, we'd be on-site at the customer address and start work promptly at 8.

It can be pretty rough before 6 with people revving up their twin diesels just so they can get started early.

Obviously that's why not that many people live in a yachting community, and those that do, hate it there ;)

Noise is one of the things that improved moving to an apartment for me. We've got bylaws about noise with quiet periods, bans on bothersome noise, a smoking ban and a (loud) pet ban. We also have better windows that block noise, and decent noise insulation in the floors despite the hard flooring.

Compared to suburbia where neighbours started mowing at 7am, loud parties went late into the night and dogs barked all day, it's oddly quiet.

A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.

Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.

One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.

Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.

Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.

A quick google suggests that British Columbia's building code only requires STC 50 which is "you can hear but not understand a neighbor's loud conversation" levels of isolation. Though maybe your city has stricter requirements?

STC 50 is a common requirement in the US too.

Only 50? I think that's pretty good when considered on its own but STC doesn't look at the whole picture. STC ratings and requirements for discrete wall and floor assemblies are a thing but with suites/party walls apparent STC is what mattered whether it was the provincial code or local bylaws. ASTC is king.

I don't know why we don't build with concrete like the rest of the world ... that should give us a higher noise isolation than wood

A bit higher possibly, but from firsthand experience let me tell you it's not enough by far. Effective noise isolation does not magically arise from used materials, it has to be planned and included in the building project. And it makes the building more expensive.

Majority construction anywhere is whatever can be built with the least cost.

In the US and Canada timber framing for buildings under about 6 feet is least cost. Other places without a lot of timber availability tend to build with other things.

I'm pretty sure you meant something other than "buildings under about 6 feet".

I assume they meant “five-over-one”, five floors of stick built (framed with dimensional lumber, not timber) apartments on top of a concrete and steel first floor.

Timber framing is something else entirely, you can construct buildings taller than six stories with engineered wood products.

> The mid-rise buildings are normally constructed with four or five wood-frame stories above a concrete podium, usually for retail or resident amenity space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

I think they meant what they wrote, they just forgot some punctuation.

'timber framing (for buildings) under about 6 feet'

Concrete is more expensive to build with than wood, and many "apartment buildings" are built with a target towards "minimum possible build cost".

I believe there are victims on both sides here when people "choose" (quotes to indicate -- "where you live isn't entirely under your control") to live in dense developments. I own subwoofers, which is a big motivation to have land and air between my walls and my neighbors. Modern constructed homes are also well sound insulated.

I actually did this with my teenage neighbor. He was learning electric guitar at hours the building had rules against. Hours I was studying throughout because of said building rules.

Whenever he switched his amp on, his landline would ring. Whenever he loudly stomped toward the phone, his landline would stop ringing.

Took three afternoons, but he learned it.

A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.

Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.

Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.

So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.

The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.

Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....

... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.

The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.

Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.

I use rain-sounds or white noise plus noise-cancelling headphones to drown out my neighbor's TV. It bugs me that I have to hear advertisements coming over the wall when I wake up. If I'm really pissed off I turn on some reggae music with good bass. It always calms me down.

When remote controls first became a thing for televisions and VHS machines there was great fun to be had confusing family members, who were used to reaching for the TV and turning the channel selector or twisting the volume up and down.

Excellent story!

There's an episode of Friends a little bit like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WYGdstEVJQ

Great story and reminds me how good I have it in my current apartment re: noise.

In NYC it is really a roll of the dice, and it doesn't matter if you rent or own in a condo/coop. In some ways renting is probably better since you can simply leave at end of lease (or break lease) without incurring huge financial costs.

In 2 of the 4 apartments I've lived over 20 years I have had underemployed neighbors who threw parties and/or watched TV on maximum volume weekdays at 4am. Wish I knew about the TV-B-Gone back in the bad TV neighbors days.

In some ways I think we've all gone soft as a society and have "broken windows policing" type rules we are reluctant to enforce, which allows the inconsiderate to infringe with impunity. Apartment buildings usually have house rules but they are generally weak on enforcement. Both of my bad neighbor problems were large enough problems that half the building was up in arms and it still took years to resolve.

This incidentally made me realize that TiVo was the gateway to Netflix's streaming model. Record episodes and binge.

Nah, the VCR was

Remimds me of the thumper story, love it when people set their neigbbors straight

I love being a social nuisance like this. Great stuff.

Genuine web 1 vibes.

This was a terrific Anduril advertisement.

So he never tried turning on the TV at full volume when his neighbor was sleeping? Maybe he left out mentioning that part. Seems kinda obvious.

this reminds me of steve wozniak's TV Jammer prank:

About 50 people were watching a basketball game on a big set with a rabbit ears antenna.

Or were trying to. Every few minutes the picture broke up. It was so bad that a tall guy was permanently stationed next to the set, endlessly fiddling with the knobs and the antenna.

Especially the antenna.

...

https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2011/03/01/jammin-woz

Infra-Red is light. How is it possible that an IR remote controls a device downstairs?

this just made my day, thank you.

Awesome ;).

Sadism.

Am I wrong?

I think the biggest problem is, everyone basically living on their own these days instead of treating neighbors like a collective of individuals that can absolutely have life changing consequences for you, if you either get along with them very well or if you annoy each other.

We humans are not build to spend our lives in front of small or big screens. It makes people angry, sad, lonely and weird and sometimes they turn the tv up just so they can have someone come by and make them feel like someone recognizes they are existing, even if it’s just to complain that they are too loud.

If people like you, they will be more willing to go out of their way to not annoy you. It’s basic psychology.

In Aghanistan I could take my helmet and body armor off, sit down next to a teenager on a piece of rubble and share my chocolate bar with them and a good laugh, watching a few guys burn an American flag in sight without being afraid I will get shot or killed.

I fixed peoples kitchen sinks and made sure they could wash their babies in water that would not make them sick, I vaccinated their children from my bonus payments, I played soccer with their kids and treated them like human beings and in return they protected me from any harm while I was in their neighborhood.

If people in a war zone can be decent human beings to each other, why can’t we do the same in our, what we think is a more civilized, superior, society?

There is a ton of stuff you can do to get along with your neighbors that neither costs you extra time or money.

Say good day and good night with a genuine smile if you meet them. Help the elderly out carrying groceries if you’re already on your way up or down.

You have no idea how often people watch through their door spy what is happening in their house, they will see it and respect you for it, even if you don’t see them.

I am a stress baker, so instead of making cookies for my own, I make a whole rack and ask my direct neighbors in the evening if they could take some off my hands so I don’t get a sugar shock. What’s better than cookies after a shit day at work?

If the parcel dude asks me if I can take a package for someone while getting my own, sure thing. If you pick it up same day I will gladly do it again, if you don’t respect my time you can drive to the post office next time. Easy as that.

Need some sugar, eggs or some papers for your joint because your stoned ass is too lazy and you forgot to buy new ones every few months, sure thing enjoy your weed brownies or smoke dude.

I can easily just kill any neighbor that annoys me. But instead I choose to find out why they do stupid stuff. And then I fix it without much noise or help them to recognize themselves there is a solution to their problem.

It might be my military mindset but I swore an oath to serve the people and protect them and that doesn’t end with being a civilian now. I am not perfect and get angry and yell at people on the internet just like any other idiot on here, but I see my neighbors more often than I see my parents and I want to live in peace, and peace is something that requires cooperation.

Dont go to war with your neighbors, try to figure out why they do stuff and offer a solution for their problem if they can’t see it themselves for whatever reason. You’ll be a lot happier and healthier if you get along with the people living in the same house. Or you could fuck with their tv and eventually get shot in the face. It’s a choice.

Most reasonable take in the entire thread. Thanks for writing.

> peace is something that requires cooperation.

Funny that many people consider peace as simply being left alone, forgetting that we are fundamentally social animals and there are many very real benefits of being part of a (functioning) society.

I bet it was an awesome shower when OP came up with this story. Nice and hot.

On the internet nobody knows if someone made up a story. They might have as well made up the whole story. This post may be a work of fiction. Maybe it never happened. But it is entertaining.

I know you’re downvoted but every time I read a story like this I get the feeling it’s mostly fiction.

Embellished, maybe, but parts of it ring true. I know from bitter experience that confronting a neighbour about noise rarely works. They can often be drunk or aggressive.

> That's Pavlovian conditioning at its best.

Actually, it's Skinnerian (operant) conditioning.

Pedantically yours, xxxxx

It's concerning that many responses in this thread have a similar story of negatively messing with someone until they adjust their behaviour. Please, if you think this is okay you shouldn't even be allowed a dog, let alone social interactions with other people.

Yeah not to be a scold, but the degree of antisocial/passive-aggressive behavior stuns me.

You think the direct approach would have worked?

Imposing your will by being better at technology is morally no different from imposing your will by being physically stronger. There's a reason civilised societies follow processes rather than having people resolve their disputes directly.

I think people should be allowed to be noisy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com