Per https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc, you can put your URL in angle brackets to override HN's URL parser:

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...>

The problem with binding asterisks to URLs is that sometimes the asterisk denotes the opening or (more likely) closing of italicized text, like this:

The URL for Hacker News is https://news.ycombinator.com/

This happens relatively often - here are a few recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391982

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40324105

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40317677

Arguably we could deal with this by binding the asterisk to the URL unless it's closing an italicized bit, but this wouldn't resolve the ambiguity completely—for example it wouldn't let you put <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...> inside italics—so it's probably better not to chase the corner cases too hard. The angle bracket notation works, but only if people know about it of course!