"Any way this could be done without requiring Javascript?"

Could be done many ways.

Lets imagine you like text, you dont mind reading something somewhat structured and regular like json and you dont need all the html, css, etc. tags and window dressing.

5-minute quick and dirty solution

1. curl -4o 1.htm http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json

    tr , '\12' < 1.htm \
    |exec sed '
    1i\
    <pre>

    /./{
    /{\"/,/}/!d;
    }
    /\"url\":[^{]/{s/\"url\":/&<\/pre><a href=/;s/$/>[FETCH]<\/a><pre>/;};
    /\"objectID\":/{s//&<\/pre><a href=https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=/;s/$/>[FETCH COMMENTS]<\/a><pre>/;s/\"//3;s/\"//3;};
    s/{\"created_at\":/\
    \
    &/g;
    /}}}/s/$/\
    \
    -----------------/g;
    $a\
    <\/pre>

   ' > 2.htm

2. Navigate to file:///2.htm

This is a totally reasonable request and I was looking to say much the same thing. Anything resembling HN, or in the spirit of HN, shouldn't require JS to view, I think.

You could render the http://jsomers.net/hn/stories.json some other way, or examine the javascript yourself, as it is not obfuscated or anything

For security, noise blocking, and public unreasonableness I have only HN allowed in my browser, that is, if a site doesn't work without js, there's a high chance I don't want to read it. My bank page luckily doesn't need js either, to function.