Something tells me you felt clever posting this. If you're open to a different perspective:

The underscore makes your text worse to read, IMO. Same with the MD anchor syntax.

HN supports italicizing by wrapping an expression with asterisks *. Why insist on a foreign standard?

HN commenters use the [{i}] notation all the time for footnote referencing. Which can be used for links, declutttering the main text.

Why add a ^?

Certainly, italics in asterisks, but underscores are valid too in plain text, double either to get bold. I wanted the _underscore_ since I was talking about plaintext and didn't want it disappeared, though I *suppose* this works too.

^ means superscript, as footnote numbers are in publishing, but more importantly, https://github.blog/changelog/2021-09-30-footnotes-now-suppo...