Comment by adamdecaf | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by adamdecaf | Hacker News Reader

To bold text you surround that text with asterisks. Like this* GEEKY ALERT! Italicize? Put underscores around the text. Strikeout? Put hyphens around it.*

Really? The most trivial markdown syntax is for the Geeks only? I don't want to live in that world; that sounds like a nightmare of truly incompetent users.

I can't stand this. Asterisks in the geek world denote actions, not bold. Underlines are frequently used for computing purposes. How is Markdown in any way friendly to geeks?

Actually, this arcane styling might make a lot of sense to non-geeks (even mothers!) who used a word processor in the early 1990s.

Also, Facebook chat uses asterisks around text to make it bold.

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