Live data from Hacker News

Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

blog.danslimmon.com

31–40 of 82 posts

Re: Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

#31

The entire car alarm industry is a scam, promoted by Republican congressman Darrell Issa. It has seriously disrupted our lives in every way imaginable and has drowned out the beauty of nature. I can’t think of a single car that has been protected by a car alarm since they were invented. They are useless and should be banned for the health and safety of mitigating noise pollution.

For poor people whose ability to live depends on having a car, car alarms must be at least sort of useful to know if your car is being stolen at night. I’m sure they’re just a noisy inconvenience to the wealthy though.

Does the alarm ever prevent theft?

Re: Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

#32
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For poor people whose ability to live depends on having a car, car alarms must be at least sort of useful to know if your car is being stolen at night. I’m sure they’re just a noisy inconvenience to the wealthy though.

Does the alarm ever prevent theft?

If I’m living in an area where they don’t go off often (like right now) and a car alarm woke me up, I would definitely check.

And I imagine if I triggered a car alarm, I would back off.

Re: Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

#34
post #28
post #8

When the oncall gets paged, an SLO should be in jeopardy in a way that requires immediate measures to be taken by a well-trained human as described in actionable terms in a linked playbook. No SLO in jeopardy, or no immediate measure that needs to be taken? Don't page the oncall; send a low-priority ticket for the service owner to investigate the next business day. Steps need to be taken, but they're mechanical in na…

In a previous life as a full-stack Engineer at a startup, this was my white whale. The state of logging, monitoring, and alerting was such that signal quality was low, and only indirect observations of the system were possible since the logging was borderline useless. The result was multiple pages per night, with each one resulting in a scavenger hunt because signal was so low that it was nigh impossible to even iden…

You know all that work was worth it when you get a good lauding.

Re: Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

#35

The entire car alarm industry is a scam, promoted by Republican congressman Darrell Issa. It has seriously disrupted our lives in every way imaginable and has drowned out the beauty of nature. I can’t think of a single car that has been protected by a car alarm since they were invented. They are useless and should be banned for the health and safety of mitigating noise pollution.

> It has seriously disrupted our lives in every way imaginable I assume this is one of those things that changes dramatically based on where you live—for me (western US), this statement seems almost comically exaggerated.

Yeah, I can't remember the last time I heard a car alarm.

Re: Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

#37
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has seriously disrupted our lives in every way imaginable I assume this is one of those things that changes dramatically based on where you live—for me (western US), this statement seems almost comically exaggerated.

Yeah, I can't remember the last time I heard a car alarm.

Visit a city

Re: Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

#38
post #26
post #17

Now, if you're annoyed by the false positive rate on your actual smoke alarms, go replace the one nearest your kitchen with a photoelectric type, not the standard ionization type that's cheaper, the default style installed, and ought to be illegal in homes (IMO). There's been quite a bit of research done, generally easy to find if you look, that talks about the difference and tests them, but the short summary: - Ioni…

The law requires you have both types of good reason. Either alone will detect less than half of all house fires. Dual sensors are not and gated. While nobody will admit what algorithm they use, they detect most fires unlike the single sensor type.

Lol “the law” .. what law? Maybe in some dumb ass jurisdiction - but you’re a bit full of yourself if you think where you happen to live is “the law”.

Re: Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

#39

> When presented with this tradeoff, the path of least resistance is to say “Let’s just keep the threshold lower. We’d rather get woken up when there’s nothing broken than sleep through a real problem.” And I can sympathize with that attitude. Undetected outages are embarrassing and harmful to your reputation. Surely it’s preferable to deal with a few late-night fire drills. > It’s a trap. > In the long run, false po…

Im not sure what you are responding to in the quoted text but after reading the article I think I can assure you that the author isnt selling you anything more salacious than you would find in a more interesting introduction to probability and statistics lecture.

Re: Car alarms and smoke alarms: tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (2012)

#40
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has seriously disrupted our lives in every way imaginable I assume this is one of those things that changes dramatically based on where you live—for me (western US), this statement seems almost comically exaggerated.

Yeah, I can't remember the last time I heard a car alarm.

I am jealous, I hear atleast one everyday. I live in an apartment complex in a suburb. I get woken up by them sometimes too
Post reply on HN