It&#x27;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 &quot;RMS&quot; (and in casual conversation, rms), Robert T. Morris by rtm, Paul Graham by pg, Eric S. Raymond by esr, etc.<p>This isn&#x27;t worship, it&#x27;s just an established convention. It may be a bit in-groupy, but so are using jargon like calling this &quot;Hacker News&quot;; you have to at least know that &quot;hacker&quot; is used in the sense of neat technical tricks, rather than the more mainstream sense of breaking into other people&#x27;s computers.