alt Hacker NewsI mean, in this case, it's 2^{0.6039n}, and the n is pretty important. I can see why trying to automatically detect cases like this would run into a bunch of wrong behaviors (either styling text that was not meant to be math notation, or parsing the implied math notation incorrectly).
Okay, I had the problem going the other way. I assumed the n was a symbol on the previous number, like an f suffix in C. But even still, 2^(0.6039n) could have been rendered in a nice way stripping out the parenthesis, leaving the core text mathematically correct.