> Not sure why HN removes indention between a leading > and the start of the text, makes quoting unnecessary hard
Because HN’s markup is the most dreary, half-assed, and useless one in the history of lightweight markups.
HN will remove a bunch of characters it doesn’t like because they might be used for fun, parse two+ newlines as a paragraph break, 4-indent as a literal block, and mis-parse * as emphasis.
That’s it. So you get all the drawbacks of HTML with almost none of the tools provided by even just the original markdown. No quoting, no line breaks, no lists, no inline code, …
2-indent is a literal block. 4-indent also is, but only because it's a 2-indent.
HN markup also supports \-escapes (so you can write \*hello\* to get *hello*), but they grow linearly, not exponentially, with repeated escapes (\\\* becomes \\*). It also truncates long URLs in display, and it handles a single pair of parentheses in them (so you can write https://example.com/print(%22Hello,%20world%21%22)). But I think that's all.
Because HN’s markup is the most dreary, half-assed, and useless one in the history of lightweight markups.
HN will remove a bunch of characters it doesn’t like because they might be used for fun, parse two+ newlines as a paragraph break, 4-indent as a literal block, and mis-parse * as emphasis.
That’s it. So you get all the drawbacks of HTML with almost none of the tools provided by even just the original markdown. No quoting, no line breaks, no lists, no inline code, …