[Semaphor]

It's markdown, a few more sites use that syntax. HN uses formatdoc which is a very small subset of markdown.

[gknoy]

Thank you! I've been wondering how people do italics and the like. Your post helped me find an HN comment [1] which discussed the Arc source code for highlighting.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606843 2: http://arcfn.com/doc/app.html#markdown

[Semaphor]

No problem, not sure if it's linked somewhere but there is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc