Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sevzinn | Hacker News Reader

Why not just "Paul"? If I'm just browsing, I'll get turned off by what appears to be worship. Shouldn't communities be more open?

View on HN

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 ;) ).

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

How can an acronym made from initials mean worshiping someone? In this case it's just laziness/terseness.

"Why not just "Paul"?"

@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.

I think most people even call him PG in person. PG is as much his name as Paul Graham.

I guess someone's having a bad day. No need to be nasty because of it.

It's just a name, calm down. Everyone has one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com