[sergiotapia]

Why do you '[1]' links?

[Confusion]

It's a pretty oldskool way to indicate footnotes in plaintext. These days footnotes are often links.

[gknoy]

Part of HN's convention, especially since there are often more than one link, is to use end-noted links rather than inline ones. This makes the prose easier to read, and still makes it easy to identify and annotate the importance of links.

[derefr]

I kind of wonder why HN doesn't support [Markdown-style](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link) links. It almost makes me miss Reddit.

I suppose it's to make it clear where links go, and discourage trolling... but browsers failing to show you where links go is a failing of browser chrome, and people who are concerned about that can install extensions that make link destinations more obvious.

[j_s]

I'm to lazy to do the classier footnote¹ most of the time.