Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pixl97 1137 days ago
If you had a tornado siren go off every 20 minutes every single day of the year, how long before you stopped ignoring the siren? How surprised would you be when a tornado hit 2 year later?

"This product causes cancer" is ineffective when the warning is plastered on everything. Same goes for warning in computer systems.

1 comments

San Francisco had a tsunami warning siren that was sound tested every Tuesday at 12pm for 30 seconds. It was fun!

It needed repairs so they dumped it. Few weeks later there was the 1st tsunami warning in ages but it went thru telephone since they dismantled their warning siren.

Every week? Damn, that's a lot. We do once a month for tornado siren tests, where I am. And not all year, but of course tsunamis aren't seasonal.
Yeah, weekly. (Can confirm.)

I always felt like it sounded like it was saying "noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon on a Tuesday" to me. Lunch time.

Also always felt like around noon on Tuesdays, we were completely vulnerable; if anything were to happen I would have heard the siren, and wandered outside looking for grub.

There is a subset of San Franciscans that do not hear the siren, too. On a pretty common basis we'd discover someone in the office who had "never heard the siren", somehow. I'm not exactly sure how. It's easily audible inside in the FiDi, and it was audible in the North Beach when I worked there.