Daniel Miessler

danielmiessler.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009

Daniel Miessler, a security professional, writes about infosec, Unix tools, tutorials, and more recently AI.

What HN saysCommenters recommend his Vim learning guide and an article on using AI, and link his piece on YouTube RSS feeds.
241HN people shared it
64linked it in comments
700stories submitted
7.3Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2009people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    A Vim Tutorial and Primer
    17 people · 201 points · first shared 2013 · 64 comments on HN
  2. 2
    A tcpdump tutorial and primer
    9 people · 546 points · first shared 2009 · 30 comments on HN
  3. 3
    Building a Successful Information Security Career (2008)
    9 people · 44 points · first shared 2014 · 1 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Google AMP Is Not a Good Thing
    6 people · 435 points · first shared 2017 · 163 comments on HN
  5. 5
    URLs vs. URIs
    6 people · 38 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    A Collection of Tutorials
    6 people · 15 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
  7. 7
    A Tmux Walkthrough
    5 people · 38 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    Obscurity: Does Changing Your SSH Port Lower Your Risk?
    4 people · 68 points · first shared 2011 · 93 comments on HN
  9. 9
    The Problem with the Job Market
    4 people · 27 points · first shared 2024 · 14 comments on HN
  10. 10
    Information Security Interview Questions
    4 people · 21 points · first shared 2011 · 13 comments on HN
  11. 11
    The Reason Software Remains Insecure
    4 people · 12 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
  12. 12
    A Security-Focused HTTP Primer
    4 people · 11 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
    Less Commonly Used Unix Commands
    3 people · 197 points · first shared 2013 · 92 comments on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

mooreds · 2026-07-05
This is my favorite article on the different ways to use AI. https://danielmiessler.com/blog/keep-the-robots-out-of-the-gym
0x2c8 · 2023-07-07
I believe this is a clear example of the Moloch effect [1]. Companies race towards having the shiniest chatbot or _virtual assistant_, without fully understanding all the implications and customer needs. Everyone wants to have their brand name associated with being "the first" or "the best" in their segment for providing such technology, no matter how trivial it may seem -- e.g. as the article points out: just wrapping already available info in a dialogue. Given these incentives and high stakes, it's also hard to "exit" the bandwagon, due to various factors like reputation, costs, and the uncertainty around your competitor not doing the same. [1]: https://danielmiessler.com/p/moloch-the-most-dangerous-idea
danielrm26 · 2023-07-04
https://danielmiessler.com Been writing there since 99, and lots of technical posts on AI lately.
hknapp · 2020-12-15
That chart can be handy, but learning vim from it is like learning German by memorizing every possible sentence. I recommend https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/ for those trying to learn vim
charsi · 2020-11-03
You don't even need a fake ID. If you want a way to 'subscribe' to channels you can just use their RSS feed. All youtube channels have RSS feeds https://danielmiessler.com/blog/rss-feed-youtube-channel/ https://gist.github.com/tjluoma/fdbc63ceb78a2aecd3d638fd18b6ec6e
FabHK · 2020-02-09
Crypto-Gram, by nestor Bruce Schneier, on IT Security: https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/ Unsupervised Learning, by Daniel Miessler, on IT Security or "intersection of security, technology, and humans", interesting links frequently: https://danielmiessler.com/newsletter/ Money Stuff, by Matt Levine, on finance, derivatives, accounting shenanigans, VC, etc., frequently very funny and insightful: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters
robterrin · 2020-01-27
This question came to mind when I read this excellent post: https://danielmiessler.com/study/infosec_interview_questions/#netsec
jkamdjou · 2019-09-06
I always point folks looking to get into cyber/infosec to this great post by Daniel Miessler: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/build-successful-infosec-career/
dredmorbius · 2019-05-01
Recommended: Learn vim For the Last Time: A Tutorial and Primer https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/ Mastering the Vim Language https://youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0 An Incremental Approach to Vim https://ctoomey.com/writing/an-incremental-approach-to-vim/
jcrben · 2017-09-25
It's a nontechnical post. For technical posts, see https://danielmiessler.com/study/ For several topics, the guy's blog is high on Google and provides detailed, plain introductions. Anyway, A player is relative to the league and specific to the skill. Tough to judge from a random blogpost. I guess that should be a platitude, but it's worth repeating.
dotsh · 2017-04-20
Many of them will be lost when editing something in vim on a completely clean remote server or anything other... Like how to explore files without NERDTree? You can learn basic Vim commands in 30min with vimtutor. One thing to keep in mind is this: https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/#language and this https://www.vi-improved.org/recommendations/
rcdmd · 2017-03-19
I would also recommend Daniel Miessler's tutorial.[1] [1]: https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/
mpiedrav · 2017-03-12
Specifically on InfoSec, I would recommend: Krebs on Security https://krebsonsecurity.com Daniel Miessler https://danielmiessler.com/blog
alltakendamned · 2016-12-20
As a counterpoint for this fluff piece for Pluralsight (mentioned 29 times), I'd like to offer the following links with very good information by well respected people in the industry: - https://www.corelan.be/index.php/2015/10/13/how-to-become-a-pentester/ - https://tisiphone.net/2015/10/12/starting-an-infosec-career-the-megami… - https://danielmiessler.com/blog/build-successful-infosec-career/
naterator · 2014-02-21
Screen is amazing for SSH work or if you just don't want to have 50 tabs open. I've been looking into tmux lately though for the later. I just found out about it last week. Seriously, the amount of commands linux has that most people don't know about is staggering. This link[1] was on HN just the other day. [1] http://www.danielmiessler.com/blog/collection-of-less-commonly-used-un…
prodigal_erik · 2010-12-04
I like this guy, he writes short pithy stuff that should be obvious if not for conventional wisdom. My favorite so far is very simple: > If you haven’t figured out what you want from life, and what makes you happy, then you can’t solve this by adjusting the amount of time you spend at work or at home. This is because neither your time at work or home will bring happiness until you’ve figured this out. - http://danielmiessler.com/blog/forget-work-life-balance-lets-talk-abou…
bookshed · 2025-09-28
> Is any of this overhead really needed? Moderation is needed, but often abused and used as a tool to create echo chambers. > What does it accomplish? As mentioned above, It accomplishes one thing: creating an echo chamber. Echo cambers are useful, because it shows "wide support" from the community while ignoring the fact that the "community" has been reduced to just the "right people". For example, in a room there are 100 people, three that have been elected / selected to lead the 97. The three, censor / kick / eliminate 90 people because of their dissenting opinions. Now, the majority (3+7=10) can rule in peace. Quite simple actually. It's basically authoritarianism that breeds fascism. This is usually a product of the death of objective truth. Oh! and this is not a LEFT vs. RIGHT problem. Here is a good read: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/bad-governments-on-the-left-and-right-…
miles · 2020-09-11
Changing SSH port is far more efficacious at reducing nonsense than the Twitter poll in the article suggests: > "I ran an experiment with a virtual machine exposed to the internet which had sshd listening on port 22. The server stayed online for one week and then I changed the ssh port to 222. The number of attacks dropped by 98%. Even though this is solely empirical evidence, it’s clear that moving off the standard ssh port reduces your server’s profile."[0] > "In the time that I gathered 7,025 connection attempts to my SSH daemon on port 22 I received 3 on port 24."[1] Also, great top comment by 16s[2] in this HN thread, "Why putting SSH on another port than 22 is bad idea".[3] [0] https://major.io/2013/05/14/changing-your-ssh-servers-port-from-the-de… [1] https://danielmiessler.com/blog/security-and-obscurity-does-changing-y… [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615994 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615734
6510 · 2020-05-17
It doesn't matter how much other people care. It is that you want to have an informed opinion - for yourself. If I make an opinion prematurely I see myself defend it while familiarizing myself with the topic. I go blind to what contradicts it and remember only what fits my preconceived ideas. This is why I try to avoid it. Perhaps other people (you) are able to suspend their uninformed opinion but I highly doubt it. But okay, I will at least try (and no doubt fail) to describe the taste of the soup before you try it: The issue is that it gets so much better if you have a lot of subscriptions (sorted by pubDate) The experience is much like a search result but with everything you enjoy mixed together. There are no notifications of course since new articles happen much to frequently. In stead you gaze over the headlines periodically and open a few articles (in the browser) Because there are few people as interested in (the proverbial) antique silver thimbles as you those articles need to float to the top or live in a different folder. I for example one time crawled a bunch of fortune 500 websites looking for feeds. The flood of press releases really gave me a sense what is going on. Lots of boring corporate speak but at least every page described a serious effort to accomplish something. You really need to subscribe to every remotely interesting small weblog you can still find so that you can at least bother to read the headlines. The small blog really needs you. This…
kd5bjo · 2019-05-12
The original idea was that you had URLs that told you where to find a thing, and URNs that identified a particular thing regardless of where it appeared. These used a unified schema (called URIs) because when you’re telling somebody else about a thing, you want to be able to refer to it by location (“the red building in the next block”) or by identity (“the main post office”). Presumably, there would be services that could take a name and tell you where to find it; not a bad assumption as every library in the world has such a system for its own collection. While this looks good on paper, in practice URLs were relatively stable in the early days of the internet and so they turned into de facto names before lots of effort was put into making URNs work. Now, we’re struggling with the issues they originally foresaw, but weren’t able to follow through with a working implementation. (For more details, see https://danielmiessler.com/study/url-uri/ where I got much of this information)
dalke · 2015-01-02
If the article is, as you say, only about math education, then it cannot conclude "any parent who opposes adoption of the CCSS is, in effect, saying, “I do not want my child prepared for life in the Twenty-First Century.”" At best it can say that a parent who opposes adoption of the CCSS for mathematics, etc. Since it makes a broad statement regarding CCSS, it cannot be, as you say, restricted to math education standards. (There's also the technical observation that CCSS is not the only way to achieve those underlying aspirational goals. I see that Minnesota has decided to not use CCSS, and assume a Minnesota parent may oppose CCSS for the honest belief that the Minnesota standards are better for a 21st century life than CCSS.) I brought up "classical educated citizen" precisely because it is a different mythos. The essay only concerns itself with one specific goal - train the workers of the top 500 companies of the 21st century. There are dozens of often opposing goals for the education system[1], and to focus on only one is a disservice. You suggest I should read some education theory, but omit that the essay author is equally lacking; which was my point. But since you bring up education theory, and elites, I feel it's useful to point out your own strawmen. We've long had multiple education methods in American schools. See http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~cac/nlu/fnd504/anyon.htm from the 1980s, on "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work". It points out that: - "In…
rvnx · 2026-06-15
> The bourgeoisie are a social class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_class#Bourgeoisie There is even a funny article here: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/a-bourgeoisie-primer There is more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/hilk3e/trying_to_unders… So, if you want to play it safe, you can say, "it's the upper middle class that own the businesses and factories" I'll give it to you
illusiveman · 2025-08-14
I read this post earlier today which I think is a good summary about the things that are going on right now https://danielmiessler.com/blog/im-worried-it-might-get-bad
surge · 2025-04-14
Reminds me of this piece: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-intellectual-dark-web-is-a-clear-c… tldr; Public discussions carry too much risk if you discuss anything honestly, you get brigaded or doxed, or things are taken out of context or re-framed by someone based on their own biases of "what you really meant". So people have gone more towards sharing their views or having honest discussions in smaller more trusted groups.
bediger4000 · 2025-03-09
Daniel Meissler has a couple of articles about this, one technical, one motivational: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/so-you-want-to-start-a-blog https://danielmiessler.com/blog/why-everyone-needs-a-blog This kind of addresses the "how do I get over $X": https://igorstechnoclub.com/why-you-need-to-blog-more-even-if-nobody-r… I took Meissler's advice after reading the "Why Everyone Needs a Blog" article. I had already come to "Igor's Techno Club" ideas by the time I read it, but Igor is very convincing. I think your motivation and content ideas are perfect. You will get better at writing by writing - that appears to be the only way to become an accomplished writer. As far as not being experienced, Mark Twain once wrote that "Experience is what you get right after you need it". Just do it. Be a human. My blog: https://bruceediger.com/
ggasp · 2025-02-15
I made a shortcut for iPad to do more or less the same thing and promised myself to keep “engineering” the prompt but work pretty well as it is. Link: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/fbb5a315cb354fbf903bcfa4f409ba95 What the shortcut does is taking the transcript of the video and asking your ChatGPT app to extract main ideas, quotes, and facts. The prompt comes originally from fabric CLI tool https://danielmiessler.com/blog/fabric-origin-story
sarlalian · 2024-10-22
For gaining expertise in vim, I generally point people at https://danielmiessler.com/p/vim/ which will teach you how to think about vim as a text manipulation language rather than just as an editor.
0xDEAFBEAD · 2023-12-17
I'd argue that privacy and security are unavoidably related. Is keeping your password secret about privacy, security, or "security through obscurity"? Depends which term you want to use :-) IMO the concept of "security by obscurity" is overused. Ultimately what matters is the cost for an attacker. If you're trying to design a secure system, your system will be stronger if you put it out there for people to criticize instead of keeping the details secret. This argument doesn't really apply to encrypting the packages you use. Security solely through obscurity isn't ideal, but what really matters is the cost/benefit ratio. It's way easier to encrypt your package downloads than it is to read all the source code changes on every package update. (Does anyone even do that?) I agree with this article: https://danielmiessler.com/p/security-by-obscurity/
riffic · 2023-08-15
google can't seem to find it but it did find this which seems up your alley: https://danielmiessler.com/p/vim/
chappi42 · 2021-11-06
> (I too need to learn Vim) well, then start. What are you waiting for? E.g. here: https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim. Don't miss Vim as Language.

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