Comment by mkl

> No idea how to get links to display properly even following "Formatting Options" instructions.

You can't have links in text posts like this. HN stories are a link or text. From https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc: "Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission."

To make proper links in comments, just put "https://" in front of them so they're URLs. "<" and ">" are for unusual URLs that get mis-detected with their surrounding text, and they are hardly ever needed.