[a3n]

Python 2. It works in FF on linuxmint at least. Save to hnlatest.py and run it from the command line, giving the url of a comment thread. It opens a new tab in your browser, latest comments at the bottom. "Tested" by inspection. :)

It would have been cooler to make a bookmarklet in javascript, but I didn't want to learn javascript for this.

  import re
  import sys
  import tempfile
  import urllib2
  import webbrowser
  
  try:
      url = sys.argv[1]
      page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
  except Exception as e:
      print 'How to run: python hnlatest.py url'
      sys.exit(2)
  
  items = re.findall('<a href="item[^>]+>', page.read())
  items = sorted(set([x.split('=')[2].split('"')[0] for x in items]))
  
  items = ['https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=' + x for x in items]
  
  with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(delete=False, suffix='.html') as tfile:
      for i in items:
          tfile.write('<a href="' + i + '">' + i + '</a>' + '<br/>\n')
  
      webbrowser.open_new_tab('file://' + tfile.name)