alt Hacker NewsSuppose you want to use asterisks to mark footnotes.* As soon as you add a second footnote,** you're in trouble because your asterisks disappear and everything between them turns bold.
* I had to escape all of these asterisks.
** I see this happen fairly often to people's comments here.
Disappearing asterisks is just terrible UX. It should turn bold but keep the asterisk displayed so you can still edit as normal.
The bullet point problem is fixed by only bolding when the asterisks are on either end of word characters.