But strangely, your comment is rendering with a couple of spans of italics. Here is a paste, with "i" tags and "<\n>" marking the odd rendering I see:

brewpackages (){ brew list --formula | xargs -n1 -P8 -I {} \ sh -c "brew info {} | egrep '[0-9]* files, ' | sed 's/^.<i>[0-9]</i> files, \<\n>(.\<i>))</i>.$/{} \1/'" | \ sort -h -r -k2 - | column -t }

is HN consuming your markup unexpectedly ?