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Persuasiveness and selection bias
I happened to be watching the Oscars last night, and I was pretty shocked to see the mistake with the Best Picture award. Thinking back on it, this is a bit surprising to me: many things are happening that should be more “shocking” (all the craziness in Washington) but don’t seem to affect me the […]
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Personal thoughts about Pyston’s outcome
I try to not read HN/Reddit too much about Pyston, since while there are certainly some smart and reasonable people on there, there also seem to be quite a few people with axes to grind (*cough cough* Python 3). But there are some recurring themes I noticed in the comments about our announcement about Pyston’s […]
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NumPy to Theano / TensorFlow: Yea or Nay?
Hey all, I’m investigating an idea and it’s gotten to the point that I’d like to solicit feedback. The idea is to use Theano or TensorFlow to accelerate existing NumPy programs. The technical challenges here are pretty daunting, but I feel like I have a decent understanding of its feasibility (I have a prototype that […]
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Amazon-Walmart arbitrage
I recently ordered some junk food from Amazon, despite my wife’s objections. I ordered it from an Amazon Market (aka third party) seller since that was the choice picked by Amazon for one-click ordering. The food arrived, and the interesting thing is that it arrived in a Walmart box, with a Walmart packing slip. Evidently, […]
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What does this print, #2
I meant to post more of these, but here’s one for fun: class A(object): def __eq__(self, rhs): return True class B(object): def __eq__(self, rhs): return False print A() in [B()] print B() in [A()] Maybe not quite as surprising once you see the results and think about it, but getting this wrong was the source […]
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Stack vs Register bytecodes for Python
There seems to be a consensus that register bytecodes are superior to stack bytecodes. I don’t quite know how to cite “common knowledge”, but doing a google search for “Python register VM” or “stack vs register vm” supports the fact that many people believe this. There was a comment on this blog to this effect as well. […]
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Why is Python slow
In case you missed it, Marius recently wrote a post on the Pyston blog about our baseline JIT tier. Our baseline JIT sits between our interpreter tier and our LLVM JIT tier, providing better speed than the interpreter tier but lower startup overhead than the LLVM tier. There’s been some discussion over on Hacker News, and the discussion […]
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Benchmarking: minimum vs average
I’ve seen this question come up a couple times, most recently on the python-dev mailing list. When you want to benchmark something, you naturally want to run the workload multiple times. But what is the best way to aggregate the multiple measurements? The two common ways are to take the minimum of them, and to […]
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Xilinx Zynq: Initial Impressions
I’ve been passively watching the FPGA space for the past few years. Partially because I think they’re a really interesting technology, but also because, as The Next Platform says: [T]here are clear signs that the FPGA is set to become a compelling acceleration story over the next few years. From the relatively recent Intel acquisition […]
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Pyston 0.4 released!
I haven’t been very active on this blog since I’ve been busy with Pyston — and we just released version 0.4, check it out on the Pyston blog!