Simply because I found what I quoted from the article to be a weird comment. What I mean is that there probably isn't very much overlap in the two-circle Venn diagram of 1) people who already are low-level enough to care about native CPU instructions and 2) those who can't think of good uses for a population count.
I'm wasn't trying to be a jerk to the author. I just found it strange and would be happy to find out that I'm an idiot and forgot about ____ programmers who fall into that category. My comment was inviting such comments. (After all, if the author meant what they wrote there, apparently they fall into that camp...)
But taken in the context of the whole article, it adds nothing of any value. The author literally spends the rest of the post describing how it is useful. Saying 'doesn't seem useful, does it?' at the beginning is a rhetorical device. The author is assuming that the reader probably doesn't have experience using bit manipulations for complex problems.
Put a little more blunt than I would have but there's nothing wrong there. Rarely a submission goes by where the first comments aren't people racing in to argue with the author.
There's an adversarial air that exists around dissecting, criticizing, nit-picking etc ideas presented, both here and in the tech world at large. As if one's most valuable contribution to a conversation is assuming the role of smug contrarian.
It's frankly tiring and obnoxious. I used to think non-geeks were just bad at communicating with us; that the fault was on their side somehow. But now I think we're just dicks.
