[Buge]

I thought it was trying to implement markdown by italicizing half my sentence when I put * in. Markdown was what popped into my mind when I saw that behavior. It would be nice if I could find a way of escaping them without having to insert spaces where I don't want spaces.

[lorenzhs]

There isn't one, HN doesn't use markdown. See https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

[kuschku]

It should use markdown, though.