If there were a search engine that, say, turned up comment-pairs where dang replied to chris_wot, then it would be easy to get a sampling of their (public) interactions. I doubt any normal search engines (or even hn.algolia.com) do it. (And both posters are active enough that going through history is impractical. BTW, as one data point, 14 of dang's last 36 comments contain the word "please".) Perhaps someone has a database of HN comments that could be queried in such a way. But yeah, in the absence of links or a pointer to such a database, it's not substantiated and so the reader's evaluation is going to depend primarily on their prior opinions.