[bink]

Even if you could delete comments, in this day and age it's not a real deletion. They'd just put a "deleted" flag on the comment in the DB.

[nozzlegear]

There's likely many iterations of HN comment datasets out there from "show hn: I scraped everyone's comments for my comp sci/big data class" over the years.

[Macha]

And there's a bunch of full scrapes of HN around anyway.