[ht_th]

The odd thing is, you can do quite some bold/italics/superscript in Unicode nowadays. Because, at least from the ASCII letter range, they have been used in symbolic ways in Mathematics, etc., and have been added to Unicode as symbols rather than bold variants of letters. For example:

, !

, !

ᴴᵉˡˡᵒ, ᵂᵒʳˡᵈ!

So, there's almost no bold/italic punctuation. And non-ASCII Unicode letters aren't "supported" this way either. But you can get quite far with "formatted" ASCII letters in Unicode, if you're so inclined.

[ht_th]

Of course, hackernews or the font it uses (?), doesn't seem to support the bold and italics Unicode symbols. Although it does seem to support the supperscript ones.

[wruza]

HN actively erases unicode regions to prevent emoji abuse and other zalgoing. Sites and apps do it nowadays, just not with emoji. It's the other side of your point – unicode can do too much and it's not a regular text, so you can't search within that sort of bold, validate, etc. So people choose to work with a subset, which may still leak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231608

[Tomte]

body { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size:10pt; color:#828282; }

td { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size:10pt; color:#828282; }