It’s matching two comments in the thread. It bolds the part that talks about iptables in each.

So it’s not like it’s irrelevant, even though it is certainly not actually the most relevant one either.

It seems to give better results if you are more specific. For example, try the following search:

how to use iptables effectively

And have a look at the first five or so results.

Also, note that OP said it’s searching about six months worth of data. So if anything specific about iptables that you were looking for is older than that then their search tool doesn’t know about it.

Yes, it's just about 6 months back. If requested by folks here, we can certainly crawl back more years - this was just the first crawl I did.

Are you crawling the HN via the normal website?

It’s better to use the API.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API