I'm seeing a lot of cases where someone writes a small post to their site and posts it as a story (or even a comment!) on HN just to get publicity for the site.

I'm seeing a lot of cases where someone writes a small post to their site and posts it as a story (or even a comment!) on HN just to get publicity for the site. So it might not always be purely for karma. Though I'm pretty new here, so this might be 'normal'.