Clearly he knows about HN. Possibly he was lurking. Maybe he's not sure or is not confident enough to comment often. What he has done is created an app and a few interesting blog posts. As far as I'm concerned, that is what HN is all about!
I've been lurking on HN for 4+ years, and I rarely ever contributed comments, mostly just read articles and read the comments to see others opinions.
Don't think this is true? Take a look at how many comments are left on articles on the front page, then if you were lucky enough to reach the front page of HN, take a look at your analytics software. You'll see something like 20k visits in a short period of time, there's no where near that number of comments. Most people passively participate in this community.