[p1necone]

If you have a monotonically increasing stream of numbers no algorithm is going to converge on a meaningful average, even if it's "correct" in a technical sense. This algorithm is intended to give a (very) cheap estimate for values with some kind of organic distribution (probably normal).

It doesn't have to be accurate for all possible edge cases because that's not the point of cheap estimation like this.

[mehrdadn]

What I said has absolutely nothing to do with monotonicity. Pick any permutation of [2N, 2N + 1, ..., 3N - 1] for N as large as you want and you'll see the algorithm estimate the median as N, which is below even the minimum.

[p1necone]

> [2N, 2N + 1, ..., 3N - 1]

This is practically the definition of monotonicity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function)

You should read the paper, it doesn't have the problems you think it has when used on real world data.

[zappy_zippy]

The parent mentioned permutation of those numbers. Does that affect your response?

Also note that the parent wasn't commenting on the algorithm in this HN submission, but rather the algorithm described in the top-level comment.