If you read the article instead of sneering at it, you might find it less noisy. It's an idiom. All idioms involve some learning, and generally some odd, seemingly-misapplied abstractions. But they generally have value, too, which is why they persist. In this case, the bit tricks work to map a very common metaphor in the design domain (a set of boolean flags) to a very common low-level implementation choice (the machine word).
Does your application benefit from that kind of mapping? Probably not, if it's a web 2.0 thing. But don't pretend that this sort of thing is never useful either. Somewhere down in the layers you don't understand, there is real machine code running your computer. And that code, like yours, needs compact and simple storage of booleans.
You're right - my comment was intentionally snarky, and deserved all the downvotes it got.
You're right - these are idioms. Idioms for working with current hardware. Essentially, these are machine implementation details, and while, yes, we currently have to program machines to get anything done, not everyone finds that kind of work rewarding or interesting.
I didn't mean to degrade the type of person that finds this interesting, I wanted to point out the divide between the hardware hacker and the, for a lack of a better term, math hacker.
Does your application benefit from that kind of mapping? Probably not, if it's a web 2.0 thing. But don't pretend that this sort of thing is never useful either. Somewhere down in the layers you don't understand, there is real machine code running your computer. And that code, like yours, needs compact and simple storage of booleans.