number of values in a list greater than a certain number

You could do something like this:

>>> j = [4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 3, 7, 5]
>>> sum(i > 5 for i in j)
3

It might initially seem strange to add True to True this way, but I don't think it's unpythonic; after all, bool is a subclass of int in all versions since 2.3:

>>> issubclass(bool, int)
True

if you are otherwise using numpy, you can save a few strokes, but i dont think it gets much faster/compact than senderle's answer.

import numpy as np
j = np.array(j)
sum(j > i)

You can create a smaller intermediate result like this:

>>> j = [4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 3, 7, 5]
>>> len([1 for i in j if i > 5])
3