[benihana]

markdown uses words wrapped in single asterisks for italics. You're using bbcode.

    *this will be italics*

produces:

this will be italics

[lambda]

Hacker News does not support markdown. It supports just italics with asterisks, blank lines for paragraphs, code blocks by indenting with two spaces (while markdown uses 4), and auto-linking URLs. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc