Aaand you've just learned all the formatting HN has :). That, and URLs automatically turn into clickable everywhere except the body of a self-submission (i.e. submitting a text instead of a link). Any other formatting here is just convention.
PSA: Rather than using underscores, _like this_, at HN you can get emphasized text using asterisks, like this. (I see _emphasis_ almost every day on HN, so IMHO it should support both. But until it does, asterisks are definitely the way to go.)
I can't see a single '*' in that thread and haven't seen any other '* * *' on HN. Do you have any third-party browser plugins installed that might cause this?
> I realized that this was
introduced by some code I wrote in 2014: Occasionally Tarsnap users need to
move a machine between accounts,
with an implicit "and I fixed that code now" or "and I will fix that tomorrow when I get enough sleep". Let's hope he writes later a follow up explaining the details.
> [a] postmortem on the front page of HN
Is that bad? I upvoted this almost instantly, then went to the comment section to upvote cperciva if he was here, then I read the full post and verified my first upvote was correct.
It's old emphasis from at least the IRC heyday era (where I picked it up), likley earlier as some of the sibling comments allude to. Interesting, HN takes asterisk characters around text and parses it to italics like this, but I tended to know that as meaning bold font emphasis, with /this/ as italics.
They used colon instead, back in pre OS X days. That’s >20 years ago. Admittedly some obscure cases carried that over and remain but you’ll rarely come across them today.
The * have gone away (HN is treating it as markdown for italics). You can put spaces around it to prevent this (e.g. the first * in the first comment is treated literally; the last * in that comment isn't).
The easiest solution is to indent the code by two spaces (HN renders it literally then).
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