"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'd especially hammer the point in this case, because clever hacks are very much on topic for Hacker News. They are, in fact, what gave birth to the word hacker and the idea of hacking in the first place. Not only that but it was precisely the clever hacks with no particular utility that were prized most highly!

If you are writing a chess engine you'll want to store hundreds of millions of positions while you search for the best move and at that scale a byte is important because it gets multiplied by an enormous factor.

This is pretty standard ( or at least used to be 20 years ago ) in high performance chess programming, see

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Bitboards

https://healeycodes.com/visualizing-chess-bitboards