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Is the _underscores_ around words supposed to signify something? Or am I just using the wrong browser to view HN and it's not rendering or something. Sorry if this is an obtuse question I'm new here.

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It's a Reddit thing, it makes the text bold on there but people seem to use it on here by accident.

It's older than that, gmail (also maybe MSN messenger?) used to have underscores italicize text, and asterisks would bold text.

Slack and WhatsApp do it, too. I bet also in most of the other major messengers around right now (Signal, Matrix, Telegram). It's a thing in MarkDown, as well. Now that I think about it, some of the only places I type prose where that's not what surrounding underscores do, are HN and various Apple programs (mail, notes, et c.)

[EDIT] For that matter, we all did the same stuff in ascii for years. Asterisks for emphasis (bold, now, in many places), underscores for underlining (which, in the case of, say, book titles, is better represented as italics if you can print italics instead, so I'd guess that's where the "underscore = italic" thing comes from)

Probably habit on the part of the OP from other markup languages, to show emphasis. HN uses asterisks * for italics/emphasis: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

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