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Comment by klysm | Hacker News Reader

Another possibility would be to freeze the results if the user is moving their mouse/arrow keys over the options.

That would not be sufficient even with a mouse: sometimes, I start moving my mouse and then click on the result that has already moved before I even started moving the mouse, but the whole interaction takes less than one second so I don't have the time to react to the update.

Graying out the results while the new one are coming can also be annoying: if the result that I am looking for is here and the new results are slow to come, I would be frustrated to be unable to click on it.

The whole situation is annoying but I don't know of a good solution and therefore I can't blame people who don't get this right.

doesn't work for mobile unfortunately

A possible solution: Human reaction time is on the order of something like 215ms, if the change happened less than 100ms ago or so, the user probably wanted the previous result as opposed to the current one. Add a additional dialog to confirm?

nifty! i was thinking that new results (even if more relevant) get appended to the bottom

This was one of the approaches I thought of but I wanted to know if this is a "solved" problem or whether there are some prevailing best practices by people who have spent time researching the various approaches

Apparently it seems like one of those "can't believe it's 2020 and we can't solve X" types of problems

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