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.