Who says this is an attempt to drum up publicity? It's an announcement to the Gradle community, who presumably knows what it is and wouldn't be very interested in an explanation. Someone posted it to HN because they thought people interested in Gradle would care about the announcement, not because HN is a marketing channel. More generally, you are not the target audience of everything posted to the internet, or even of everything of interest to HN. That's OK.
Anyone interested in Gradle already knows about Gradle 2.0's release, or will when they next read their email or twit feeds. This announcement on Hacker News is an attempt to market Gradle. The announcement submitter's username was created specifically to submit the article.
Meaning, for example, the tweet that links to this article? [1] Doesn't look like they have a current mailing list other than notifications from...the forum this article was posted in. If they wanted to market Gradel to HN (rather than simply spread the word that they have a new release to the intersection of the two communities), they'd presumably use, you know, marketing material. After deciding that they're doing X, complaining that they didn't do even the most obvious thing required to succeed at X is a pretty good sign that they weren't trying to do X in the first place. "Your post is the worst attempt to write a novel I've ever seen!"
Are you joking ? I have been doing Java development for a decade now and would never have heard about this. It's always interesting hearing about major product releases.
