[skeaker]

Alternate clients and APIs aside, HN has a simple enough layout that you can really easily write up some JS as a browser extension to modify the page a whole lot to your own preferences. Comments have exact timestamps baked into the hovertext of their age, so you could have your script grab all of the comments from the page, sort them by their timestamps, then set all the indent widths to 0. Replies could really easily be tracked and added to the page by reading the parent URL on each comment. Might look into doing this myself later.