We could use ﹡these﹡ instead. U+FE61, small asterisk.

We could use ∗these∗ instead. U+2217, asterisk operator.

Interestingly, U+2731, heavy asterisk, is stripped by HN it seems.

But to be honest, none of them feel the same as the one true *. I looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... hoping there was a way to elevate and scale down a character by some special code to make it look like a regular asterisk but didn't see any. Also, with unusual code points, font support is generally lacking so to some readers of HN, the above mentioned variations will probably render as something such as just squares. Furthermore, one of those I used above mess with apparent line spacing for me.