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.
I suspect it's a lot less common today than in Graham's generation. I wonder if it's less than coincidence Jamie Zawinski is one of the last people to get "ownership" of their initials and worked on Netscape.
Heck even first name initial plus last name is a bit dated.
There is nothing worshipping about it, PG is simply known as that around here because that's his hacker news user name (he founded the site, so I guess that short names were still available when he set it up ;) ).
So if he was referred to as 'Paul' when there are millions of Pauls then you would have no problem with it even though then you'd need more context to know who he was but if he's refered to his particular handle on hn, on hn then that's excluding people from the club? It wasn't as if membership of that particular club was forced on you and it's not as if it is a secret. Lighten up. For that matter, plenty of people here are only known by their handles, so if you see a reference to some person and it does not make sense to you at first it's ok to assume that is a handle. We also don't do @xxx and such around here (at least, not unless someone indicates a twitter handle).
@Sevzinn, if you look at any source code or languages for that matter (Arc) pg has written, you'll see small labels used as opposed to long descriptive ones. Succinctness wins over verbosity.
