From the article, I'm guessing the author was using a version <2.x. Incidentally, I ran my function and f6 from the article on a list of 9600 integers using Py

From the article, I'm guessing the author was using a version <2.x. Incidentally, I ran my function and f6 from the article on a list of 9600 integers using Python 2.6.3. f6 ran in 0.00303250832159 seconds and my function ran in 0.00421450212248 seconds.