You have to indent the text by two or more spaces to count as code. Hacker News doesn't use Markdown, so backticks don't work. FWIW, this is clear in the "help

You have to indent the text by two or more spaces to count as code. Hacker News doesn't use Markdown, so backticks don't work. FWIW, this is clear in the "help" link by the textarea.