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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
“domestic wood-burning is the largest source of particulate pollution in the UK. Only 8% of the UK’s homes burn wood, but this accounts for around 21% of the total PM2.5 emissions, whereas all traffic on the UK roads produces 13%” https://medium.com/the-new-climate/why-the-environmental-mov...
Ah yes, the proverbial Quick Google Search that proves me wrong.
Sorry, can't be bothered to take any of that noise seriously.
As I pointed out in my other now-censored post, I breathe in smoke every day through the copious amount of weed I smoke, and have done so for decades. I'm in perfect health. Odds are, much better than you in fact.
When was the last time you were sick? For me it has been decades. Let's compare notes and decide which of us really knows the meaning of health.
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.
If you want "fresh air", why do you live near other people? Especially an entire neighborhood full of people who burn things, if you hate smoke. You can't have everything exactly how you please.
Nothing worse than a busybody neighbor who thinks he owns the patent on how to live in a neighborhood.
I live way out in the country exactly so I can live how I choose without some judgmental ass breathing down my neck. Maybe you should do the same to escape the terrible, obnoxious smell of burning wood.
I'm sure there's weed smokers in the neighborhood causing you serious quality of life problems too. Escape while you still can!
Good neighborhood = keep your emissions low. Be it sound, light, or smell. These rules apply to almost all public places. If you want to be loud, burn shit or have floodlights, move to a place outside of the city.
i see both sides, having lived with both super sensitive and petty neighbors, and also inconsiderate, loud neighbors.
There are definitely sensitive people who have either misophonia rage, or PTSD from something, and they can't handle normal levels of city noise.
on top of that, some apartments simply allow smoking inside. If they always use the balcony, they're really doing you a favor.
if you are worried about emissions, you really have to think about cars and refineries and jets, and even restaurants. These are incredibly out of control when it comes to pollution and disease.
in my experience, if you're buying machines and building devices, and your target refuses to play that game, then it's clear who the adult is, and who the child is.
I don't mind the gunshots near my house during hunting season, because I have good neighbors. Those shots mean my freezer is getting stocked with venison.
I live far enough out that the gunshots are usually people hunting NFS land.
A huge swath of it borders my property, as I'm the last house up the road on my mountain.
I don't mind 'em at all, though. I think it's locals, just folks I haven't met. They keep it clean and they go up far enough I can't hear anything besides the rifle crack.
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.
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.
They are not "awful people". You chose to live in a multi-unit apartment building with balconies close to windows, where so many neighbours smoke on the balconies that there is _always_ someone smoking close enough to make your apartment smell disgusting, then you judge them all as if they knew how much gets into your home and how sensitive you are to it. Instead of proposing an hourly half hour no smoke compromise on the next meeting of the building's co-owners, you just declare them awful people just because smoking is part of their lives. They live in a city and can't "just quit". That doesn't make them awful people.
Tbh, I'd rather live with most of them than with you. Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
> Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
They’re more pleasant to coexist with because they let their smoke drift into my home instead of their own? What? They’re just externalizing the negatives of their own vice.
a) are aware that their smoke isn't dispersed enough by the breeze / open space to be unnoticeable.
b) know there is someone close enough who isn't like them and other smokers, and is really bothered by the smoke.
They do, however, go smoke on their balconies since they were made aware smoking inside is bad for their roommates/family.
So, many of them are more likely than not reasonable people. They _could be_. While you _proved_ that you aren't, by not communicating it (or at least not mentioning it as if it isn't the most important reason why they are "awful people"), just judging them and holding a grudge.
In this very comment you again showed that you don't care enough to understand others who you might disagree with, because I am just rephrasing what I already wrote, since you replied like I didn't.
Yeah, it's a bit worrying that some people don't seem to understand that just because you enjoy smoking, doesn't mean the rest of the units downstream of you want to breath it in too.
What's truly worrying is that you don't seem to understand that just because you don't enjoy smoking, doesn't mean it confers any kind of obligation on anyone else's part.
> I don't drink coffee. And even if I did, caffeine is not a drug that spreads to others in the air they breathe.
No, it's much more insidious. It amps people up like crack cocaine or methamphetamine. It's a real killer--people have died from it. That's why the U.S. military absolutely bans caffeine use during basic training, for example. It's a really dangerous drug that should be controlled. The people pushing this poison should be behind bars. Think of the children.
I don't disagree with your general intent. Let's not put cocaine and amphetamines on the same level as caffeine though. Some drugs are orders of magnitude more harmful than others. Alcohol would have to be erased from human society before caffeine ever entered our crosshairs.
Also, you should remember my comment was about the route of administration. A drug you take is your choice. An airborne drug works its way into your system whether you want it or not.
Your ancestors have had many opportunities to leave Hong Kong over the years. They did not, nor have you. If close interaction with people who have different values than you bothers you, then move. There are other places to live in the world besides Hong Kong. You don't have to wage war against your neighbors who are simply trying to enjoy a smoke.
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.
Attaboy! You punish that poor smoker for his unacceptable behavior. Now you can finally enjoy Your air the way that You like it. I'm guessing the rotten dog now has to go down the street to an abandoned lot 200 feet away from anything to enjoy a smoke? Good. He's learned his place--away from his betters.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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)
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/316/
Oh I had one of those neighbors too, but I don't even count them in my bad noisy neighbors list.
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!
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.
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.
I’d tell him “no worries I will pay more attention next time”.
did you not read the last line of the post?
No, but he will pay more attention next time.
Bazinga
Oh Jaysus
This reminds me of this guy [1]
___________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.
> people aren't total idiots.
You clearly haven't met that many people.
LOL, this reminds me of that iconic TBBT episode where Sheldon "trains" Penny with "positive reinforcement". ;)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qy_mIEnnlF4
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.
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.
Sounds like a hellish existence, friend. No wonder all the elites like that place so much.
Invasive "elites" are harder to eradicate than possums :/
https://predatorfreenz.org/toolkits/know-your-target-predato...
German shepherds seem to help with the possums. I wonder…
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.
Wood smoke is harmful? Hardly.
Did you notice how they have banned and demonized tobacco, but the lung cancer rate keeps increasing? I just don't get it!
Now they're coming for wood stoves next. I'm sure the cancer will go away after that.
“Burning wood at home produces more pollution than road traffic” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjdne9ke0m1o
“Residential wood-burning is the biggest source of particulate matter and soot/black carbon in Europe” https://www.fern.org/publications-insight/latest-evidence-on...
“domestic wood-burning is the largest source of particulate pollution in the UK. Only 8% of the UK’s homes burn wood, but this accounts for around 21% of the total PM2.5 emissions, whereas all traffic on the UK roads produces 13%” https://medium.com/the-new-climate/why-the-environmental-mov...
Ah yes, the proverbial Quick Google Search that proves me wrong.
Sorry, can't be bothered to take any of that noise seriously.
As I pointed out in my other now-censored post, I breathe in smoke every day through the copious amount of weed I smoke, and have done so for decades. I'm in perfect health. Odds are, much better than you in fact.
When was the last time you were sick? For me it has been decades. Let's compare notes and decide which of us really knows the meaning of health.
Everything is a lie. Believe none of it.
> Did you notice how they have banned and demonized tobacco, but the lung cancer rate keeps increasing?
No, I noticed the opposite. They demonized tobacco, and lung cancer rates went dowm precipitously.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/11/...
https://cancer.osu.edu/news/a-new-face-of-lung-cancer-is-eme...
https://www.mskcc.org/news/lung-cancer-in-women-and-nonsmoke...
https://www.dukehealth.org/blog/lung-cancer-young-and-middle...
https://pressroom.cancer.org/releases?item=1262
https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/well/prevention/young-wom...
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.
I cannot fathom making this comparison.
If you want "fresh air", why do you live near other people? Especially an entire neighborhood full of people who burn things, if you hate smoke. You can't have everything exactly how you please.
Nothing worse than a busybody neighbor who thinks he owns the patent on how to live in a neighborhood.
I live way out in the country exactly so I can live how I choose without some judgmental ass breathing down my neck. Maybe you should do the same to escape the terrible, obnoxious smell of burning wood.
I'm sure there's weed smokers in the neighborhood causing you serious quality of life problems too. Escape while you still can!
Good neighborhood = keep your emissions low. Be it sound, light, or smell. These rules apply to almost all public places. If you want to be loud, burn shit or have floodlights, move to a place outside of the city.
i see both sides, having lived with both super sensitive and petty neighbors, and also inconsiderate, loud neighbors.
There are definitely sensitive people who have either misophonia rage, or PTSD from something, and they can't handle normal levels of city noise.
on top of that, some apartments simply allow smoking inside. If they always use the balcony, they're really doing you a favor.
if you are worried about emissions, you really have to think about cars and refineries and jets, and even restaurants. These are incredibly out of control when it comes to pollution and disease.
in my experience, if you're buying machines and building devices, and your target refuses to play that game, then it's clear who the adult is, and who the child is.
> move to a place outside of the city
Now there's an idea I can get behind. Best move I ever made. City living and I just don't mix.
Five miles from pavement, and my air quality is perfect 365 days per year.
I hear some gunshots during hunting season, echoing across the valley, but they'd be drowned out by the frogs singing--they're way louder.
Wait until these guys start telling you you don't need a truck.
> I hear some gunshots during hunting season
I don't mind the gunshots near my house during hunting season, because I have good neighbors. Those shots mean my freezer is getting stocked with venison.
I live far enough out that the gunshots are usually people hunting NFS land.
A huge swath of it borders my property, as I'm the last house up the road on my mountain.
I don't mind 'em at all, though. I think it's locals, just folks I haven't met. They keep it clean and they go up far enough I can't hear anything besides the rifle crack.
Right there with you man. Frogs and crickets and birds and all.
What about a really loud fire alarm outside your house, that goes off whenever it detects even a slight amount of smoke?
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.
They are not "awful people". You chose to live in a multi-unit apartment building with balconies close to windows, where so many neighbours smoke on the balconies that there is _always_ someone smoking close enough to make your apartment smell disgusting, then you judge them all as if they knew how much gets into your home and how sensitive you are to it. Instead of proposing an hourly half hour no smoke compromise on the next meeting of the building's co-owners, you just declare them awful people just because smoking is part of their lives. They live in a city and can't "just quit". That doesn't make them awful people.
Tbh, I'd rather live with most of them than with you. Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
> Since they smoke on the balcony, rather than near roommates/family, many are likely more mindful and pleasant to coexist with than what you displayed.
They’re more pleasant to coexist with because they let their smoke drift into my home instead of their own? What? They’re just externalizing the negatives of their own vice.
You haven't mentioned that they:
a) are aware that their smoke isn't dispersed enough by the breeze / open space to be unnoticeable.
b) know there is someone close enough who isn't like them and other smokers, and is really bothered by the smoke.
They do, however, go smoke on their balconies since they were made aware smoking inside is bad for their roommates/family.
So, many of them are more likely than not reasonable people. They _could be_. While you _proved_ that you aren't, by not communicating it (or at least not mentioning it as if it isn't the most important reason why they are "awful people"), just judging them and holding a grudge.
In this very comment you again showed that you don't care enough to understand others who you might disagree with, because I am just rephrasing what I already wrote, since you replied like I didn't.
No, in my experience they smoke on the balcony because it is banned inside and will get them evicted.
Yeah, it's a bit worrying that some people don't seem to understand that just because you enjoy smoking, doesn't mean the rest of the units downstream of you want to breath it in too.
What's truly worrying is that you don't seem to understand that just because you don't enjoy smoking, doesn't mean it confers any kind of obligation on anyone else's part.
> you just declare them awful people just because smoking is part of their lives
They're awful people because they are drug addicts who insist on making their unbearable smoke part of our lives too.
I'll remember your hypocrisy next time I see you with the caffeine jitters.
Addict. Seek help, please.
I don't drink coffee. And even if I did, caffeine is not a drug that spreads to others in the air they breathe.
> I don't drink coffee. And even if I did, caffeine is not a drug that spreads to others in the air they breathe.
No, it's much more insidious. It amps people up like crack cocaine or methamphetamine. It's a real killer--people have died from it. That's why the U.S. military absolutely bans caffeine use during basic training, for example. It's a really dangerous drug that should be controlled. The people pushing this poison should be behind bars. Think of the children.
I don't disagree with your general intent. Let's not put cocaine and amphetamines on the same level as caffeine though. Some drugs are orders of magnitude more harmful than others. Alcohol would have to be erased from human society before caffeine ever entered our crosshairs.
Also, you should remember my comment was about the route of administration. A drug you take is your choice. An airborne drug works its way into your system whether you want it or not.
Fact check: false. Smelling the scent of cigarette smoke isn't harmful, and it won't get you high.
I didn't "choose" to live in a multi-unit apartment, I live in Hong Kong - there is no other option.
"Just leave them!" Yeah. Ok.
Try empathy, it's free.
Your ancestors have had many opportunities to leave Hong Kong over the years. They did not, nor have you. If close interaction with people who have different values than you bothers you, then move. There are other places to live in the world besides Hong Kong. You don't have to wage war against your neighbors who are simply trying to enjoy a smoke.
"Just leave then"
Fine, I'll take the bait.
I moved here by choice, my "ancestors" have nothing to do with Hong Kong.
I also don't wage a war against my neighbours who are simply trying to "enjoy a smoke".
I still don't appreciate when my house smells of cannabis when I leave the window open and don't turn on the fans I have in the balcony.
My neighbours could turn on a fan to dissipate the smoke, they don't it's inconsiderate, but I'm not going to ruin their day over it.
Moving over this, does not make any sense, the whole argument of "If you don't like it then leave" reeks of ignorant entitlement.
YOU are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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 ...
Attaboy! You punish that poor smoker for his unacceptable behavior. Now you can finally enjoy Your air the way that You like it. I'm guessing the rotten dog now has to go down the street to an abandoned lot 200 feet away from anything to enjoy a smoke? Good. He's learned his place--away from his betters.
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.
If you were to disable the speaker, they would probably never notice...
> 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'.
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.
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…
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.
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 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 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.
Unfortunately this doesn't work if you spawn your own noise polluter and they live in your house.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Used to do that at school with an old palm pilot. Good times.
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
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.
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 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.
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-B-Gone Kit:
https://github.com/adafruit/TV-B-Gone-kit
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.
A spark gap does pretty well. But the FCC fowns on such things.
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.
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.
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
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.
With line of sight too?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 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 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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I love being a social nuisance like this. Great stuff.
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
This is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.
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.
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
This incidentally made me realize that TiVo was the gateway to Netflix's streaming model. Record episodes and binge.
Nah, the VCR was
This was a terrific Anduril advertisement.
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.
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.
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!
This is a really good idea. Somebody build this!
And get it into a modern certification. Want LEEDS? Get the sound measurement people out.
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.
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
Concrete is more expensive to build with than wood, and many "apartment buildings" are built with a target towards "minimum possible build cost".
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 think they meant what they wrote, they just forgot some punctuation.
'timber framing (for 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
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.
Remimds me of the thumper story, love it when people set their neigbbors straight
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.
Genuine web 1 vibes.
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
this just made my day, thank you.
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.
Awesome ;).
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.
Sadism.
Am I wrong?
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?
I think people should be allowed to be noisy.