Let's say you've got an airplane, and it is low on fuel. Unless the plane drops 3000 pounds of passenger weight, it will not be able to reach the next airport. To save the maximum number of lives, we would like to throw the heaviest people off of the plane first. ...

I wanted to compare reading lines of string input from stdin using Python and C++ and was shocked to see my C++ code run an order of magnitude slower than the equivalent Python code. Since my C++ is rusty and I'm not yet an expert Pythonista, please tell me if I'm doing something wrong or if I'm mis...

Please explain to me why the very last echo statement is blank? I expect that XCODE is incremented in the while loop to a value of 1: ...

I am trying to use the Directory.GetFiles() method to retrieve a list of files of multiple types, such as mp3 's and jpg 's. I have tried both of the following with no luck: ...

I need something like this: 11 Answers 11 ...

I am able to serialize an object into a file and then restore it again as is shown in the next code snippet. I would like to serialize the object into a string and store into a database instead. Can anyone help me? ...

I need to use different functions to treat numeric columns and string columns. What I am doing now is really dumb: 6 Answer...

I'm dealing with a Postgres table (called "lives") that contains records with columns for time_stamp, usr_id, transaction_id, and lives_remaining. I need a query that will give me the most recent lives_remaining total for each usr_id ...

I have a pandas data frame and would like to plot values from one column versus the values from another column. Fortunately, there is plot method associated with the data-frames that seems to do what I need: ...

In Python, what is the best way to compute the difference between two lists? 14 Answers ...