> The generally preferred > method on HN is to begin > the line with a >

The problem with ">"-style quoting, is that the markup doesn't recognize them. Nor does it preserve the preceding newline. So if you are quoting anything more than a one-liner, you get a mess.

That's true. HN is a little too lean on the markup.

Even though that is considered one its main features, HN would definitely benefit from a markup for quotes.

You can double newline

like this, to get a line break

@foota, yes double-line break kinda works. But it forces each line to be a para and that looks ugly. I prefer to use italics in these cases as @akvadrako suggests.

But italics is not great either, because the light-weight syntax with asterisks is really meant for a small bits of text. It gets brittle for long texts which might include asterisks, or other things that confuse the markup.