I did start a poll on it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5506656

It's truly depressing to see this submission sitting at 20+ upvotes, on HN of all places.

Just because you know something doesn't mean everyone else does. This is one of those mentalities that prevents people from asking questions and learning new things. You're sitting in a classroom and the professor goes over a challenging topic but you look around and it seems everyone else understands it. So to save yourself from looking stupid you don't ask a question.

If you've had a formal education in programming then you've probably at least heard of bitwise operators. If not then I could definitely see these things not coming up. Either way I find compiler optimizations neat so I figured I'd make a post and share about some of the basic ones.

As I said, it's depressing to see this sort of topic being of an interest to a wider HN audience. It's not the topic that's bad, it's the audience composition that's disappointing.