
How to escape an asterisk character on Hacker News? - SimeVidas
When writing a comment on HN, if you wrap a word in asterisks, they disappear and the word is italicized. That’s how Markdown-based text works, but usually the user can place a backslash before the first asterisk to escape it (e.g. try on GitHub) in order to prevent this and instead display the asterisks literally. This does not seem to be possible on HN. Is there an alternative?
======
nprescott
You can use 3 asterisks - __* to italicize a single asterisk:

    
    
      *** as such
    

Or you could always use a pre-formatted block:

    
    
      * just prefix with two spaces

