I take your point about the risk of falling into the trap of "more is more", but we're not talking about how to build NAND gates - we're talking about how integers are represented by bits and how that knowledge can be leveraged. For instance, if the author of the code showcased in the article had a bit more knowledge about how integers are stored internally, they would have realized they could have simply divided by 2^22 even if they didn't have access to a low-level bit-shift operator.
The solution in the article is a bit of a mystery. To come up with that particular solution you already know what bits are, because the first step is formatting the number as bits. Everyone, even people clueless of computers, know that computers are "ones and zeroes" i.e. binary.
Keep in mind "The Daily WTF" is widely suspected to be making up most of its articles.
