from what I can tell, every item in the hackernews data set is a monotonically increasing integer id and comments/posts are not fundamentally treated differently.
for instance your comment is 26227524
and the parent post is 26225373
edit: hacker news pagination is not high priority apparently since they just use the easiest way with p= some number.
It's okay for a submission to show up twice/not show up at all on a single page view of HN, so I can see why it wouldn't be a priority.
For forum like UI it is better to have numbered pages in ny opinion.