ronnix

If Dropbox is still hosted on EC2 and S3, I guess there's not much hardware to see. :)

There are rumours they're moving away from Amazon, however: http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-moving-away-from-EC2

Anyone has insights on this?

I think 80 characters is getting a bit narrow, but some people like to be able to open several files (e.g. the code and the tests) in VIM or Emacs, with the buffers vertically arranged next to each other.

$ python -c "import this"

Great advice!

I've always been annoyed by those e-mail invitations to the beta of a service I signed up to many weeks ago, that don't give me any clue to remind me why I cared in the first place...

Most compilers typically do a good job, but I was surprised to see such a difference on some examples.

On those examples, Clang seems to be usually better than GCC at static code evaluation and local optimizations.

However, GCC beats Clang in examples 2 and 3 due to better loop optimization capabilities (such as unrolling), allowing it to use SSE instructions.

Example 3 show that the Intel compiler has even stronger unrolling and vectorization capabilities. Not unexpected, as their compiler has to be especially good at this in order to get good performance on the Itanium architecture (IA-64).

I'm also impressed by the trick used by ICC in example 7 (using a bittest against a statically computed bitmap to implement the comparisons).

It will be quite interesting to see the results the researchers will get on many more examples...

Here is a comprehensive list of Python implementations: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonImplementations

It's not dead, it's sleeping.

You can also write it this way, which is more similar to C:

  x = (a==42) and f() or g()

Scala and (to a lesser extent) Clojure seem to be more popular choices among (ex-)Java people nowadays.

You can have a one-line "if" statement [1]:

  if a == 42: print "Yes" ; do_stuff()

It's true that you cannot have a "else" statement on the same line, however.

But in some cases, you could use a conditional expression instead [2]:

  x = f() if a == 42 else g()

[1] http://docs.python.org/reference/compound_stmts.html

[2] http://docs.python.org/reference/expressions.html#conditiona...