News.YC as yet has no syntax for linking from text as in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Li... Wikipedia] or [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode]BBCode[/url] or [Markdown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown).

News.YC also doesn't follow the recommendation of appendix C of RFC3986 <http://www.rfc.net/rfc3986.html>; with regard to angle-brackets as URL-delimiters -- and it even inserted that stray semicolon.

Hence the footnotes even in tiny comments... they look nicer, not breaking the flow of the writing so much.