[empath-nirvana]

You actually don't need to do that part in the algorithm. If you don't know the length of the list, you can just choose a threshold that seems reasonable and calculate the margin of error after you're done processing. (or i guess at whatever checkpoints you want if it's continuous)

In this example, they have the length of the list and choose the threshold to give them a desired margin of error.

[rcarmo]

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390192