It probably is pure PR. The first poster of the article on HN[0] is hemera — the author of the article, whose account was opened just for the sake of posting that article. (S)he is active in the next post[1], but behaves more like a PR-employee than a hacker having spent two months of research on this stuff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440612 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441113