It's common in the hacker circles to refer to people by their usernames, and it was long a convention that people go by their initials as their username (at lea

It's common in the hacker circles to refer to people by their usernames, and it was long a convention that people go by their initials as their username (at least in the East Coast, MIT influenced groups). Thus Richard M Stallman goes by "RMS" (and in casual conversation, rms), Robert T. Morris by rtm, Paul Graham by pg, Eric S. Raymond by esr, etc. This isn't worship, it's just an established convention. It may be a bit in-groupy, but so are using jargon like calling this "Hacker News"; you have to at least know that "hacker" is used in the sense of neat technical tricks, rather than the more mainstream sense of breaking into other people's computers.