One suggestion: the point ranking could be merely probabilistic -- for each comment set its "page-sort" score by selecting a random number between 1 and the comment's score. (For negative comments, between 0 and their score?) Then sort the comments by their page-sort score. I've looked at this mostly on reddit, since their threads are much more popular than on HN, but finding late wheat in the chaff of low-voted comments can be a problem when threads get large.