{"slug": "nmap", "name": "Nmap", "category": "networking", "category_name": "Networking and VPN", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 10, "warners": 1, "score": 3.248, "rising": -0.98, "first": "2025-11-24", "latest": "2026-10-11", "why": "Those who cannot remember nmap are condemned to remake it poorly", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 6, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Those who cannot remember nmap are condemned to remake it poorly", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "nmap.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://nmap.org", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Nmap", "nmap"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 747847200, "item_id": 46740450, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46740450", "by": "gerdesj", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "After that you will need nmap and wireshark.", "excerpt": "Good skills - you are well on the way to Engineer with a capital E. You cannot see network traffic. You'd be amazed at how many people think they can diagnose a network fault without using tools like this. Everyone is an expert until they prove themselves to be a bit of a twit! At layer 1 you have electrical issues to deal with and that will need some hardware. Obviously you need to pick your network model too. Here ", "context": "", "use_case": "network diagnosis", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go"}, {"id": 747784256, "item_id": 46736516, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736516", "by": "mmh0000", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Those who cannot remember nmap are condemned to remake it poorly", "excerpt": "There's a famous quote: Those who cannot remember nmap are condemned to remake it poorly Rootless nmap scan of a /24 in under 10 seconds: nmap -T5 -sn -PR --script broadcast-dns-service-discovery,broadcast-upnp-info 10.0.0.0/24 \u2026SNIP\u2026 Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (30 hosts up) scanned in 9.99 seconds https://nmap.org/book/toc.html", "context": "", "use_case": "Network scanning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go"}, {"id": 737463872, "item_id": 46091492, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46091492", "by": "0134340", "date": "2025-11-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Do you mean something like nmap's network topolgy view?", "excerpt": "Do you mean something like nmap's network topolgy view? https://nmap.org/book/zenmap-topology.html Just for visualizing network topology on Linux, there's a lot of tools.", "context": "", "use_case": "Network topology visualization", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Network Monitor \u2013 a GUI to spot anomalous connections on your Linux"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 747752003, "item_id": 46734500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734500", "by": "N3802E", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I've never even found a way to get arp or nmap to get close to Advanced IP Scanner", "excerpt": "This looks great! I've been searching for something like this for ever. Some feedback of what I found on my network, as compared to some other scanners I've used. I've never seen anything that can beat Advanced IP Scanner at finding hostnames. I've never even found a way to get arp or nmap to get close to Advanced IP Scanner; I've tried dozens of suggested commands of each, all with no luck. Here's the results of my ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go"}]}], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["network scanning", "host discovery by agents", "port scanning own host", "network diagnosis", "network topology visualization"], "compared": [], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731432", "title": "Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50047180", "title": "Ask HN: How do swarms of AI agents work?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49248388", "title": "I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48474274", "title": "Emacs Appearances in Pop Culture", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825417", "title": "item 46825417", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788720", "title": "item 46788720", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 2, "neutral": 2}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 800775537, "item_id": 50048471, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50048471", "by": "zeroroot-ai", "date": "2026-10-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a discovery agent runs nmap on a discovered host", "excerpt": "I have built toward this for the last year, first for my own bug bounty work, then as a platform. I dont work for a frontier-grade provider though, but have a lot of distributed systems/platform engineering experience. Here is what I have learned: Direct inter-agent communication is tough to scale, tons of messages, agents drift and the cost grows with the square of the agent count. At large scale, agents should almo", "context": "", "use_case": "host discovery by agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How do swarms of AI agents work?"}, {"id": 788945665, "item_id": 49309104, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309104", "by": "hn_throw2025", "date": "2026-08-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I check with nmap periodically.", "excerpt": "I agree with you. I\u2019m reading this thread and wondering if I\u2019m missing something, why people are still talking about port knocking, port obfuscation, and fail2ban. I use a cloud VPS. I ssh in via Tailscale. The cloud provider firewall blocks all incoming connections except traffic originating from Cloudflare IP ranges on port 443. My host plays dead to portscans. I check with nmap periodically. I have a break-glass b", "context": "", "use_case": "port scanning own host", "switched_from": "", "story": "I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)"}, {"id": 775985968, "item_id": 48499123, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499123", "by": "saaspirant", "date": "2026-06-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Nmap In The Movies", "excerpt": "Something similar: Nmap In The Movies https://nmap.org/movies/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Emacs Appearances in Pop Culture"}, {"id": 749206691, "item_id": 46825418, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825418", "by": "ashwaa101", "date": "2026-01-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "current stack includes Nuclei, OWASP ZAP, Nmap, httpx", "excerpt": "Hi HN \u2014 I\u2019m building Thandev, a \u201csecurity control room\u201d for web app scanning. I started it because running multiple tools (Nuclei, ZAP, Nmap, etc.) often produces a lot of duplicated alerts and messy outputs, and it\u2019s hard to turn scans into a short, actionable list. Thandev tries to normalize + dedupe findings across tools and present them as something you can actually work through. What it does today Takes a target", "context": "", "use_case": "network scanning", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 748619546, "item_id": 46788721, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788721", "by": "singularity99", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Recon Agent \u2192 nmap, ffuf, subfinder, amass", "excerpt": "Hey HN! I'm excited to share CodePhreak v4.0 \u2013 an open-source autonomous pentesting platform that uses multi-agent AI to find security vulnerabilities in your infrastructure. *The Problem:* Two years ago, I was paying $8K-15K per pentest for my SaaS company. At quarterly testing (required for SOC2), that's $32K-60K/year just to check if we introduced new bugs. For a startup, this was unsustainable. Manual pentesting ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 747847200, "item_id": 46740450, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46740450", "by": "gerdesj", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "After that you will need nmap and wireshark.", "excerpt": "Good skills - you are well on the way to Engineer with a capital E. You cannot see network traffic. You'd be amazed at how many people think they can diagnose a network fault without using tools like this. Everyone is an expert until they prove themselves to be a bit of a twit! At layer 1 you have electrical issues to deal with and that will need some hardware. Obviously you need to pick your network model too. Here ", "context": "", "use_case": "network diagnosis", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go"}, {"id": 747784256, "item_id": 46736516, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736516", "by": "mmh0000", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Those who cannot remember nmap are condemned to remake it poorly", "excerpt": "There's a famous quote: Those who cannot remember nmap are condemned to remake it poorly Rootless nmap scan of a /24 in under 10 seconds: nmap -T5 -sn -PR --script broadcast-dns-service-discovery,broadcast-upnp-info 10.0.0.0/24 \u2026SNIP\u2026 Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (30 hosts up) scanned in 9.99 seconds https://nmap.org/book/toc.html", "context": "", "use_case": "Network scanning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go"}, {"id": 747752003, "item_id": 46734500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734500", "by": "N3802E", "date": "2026-01-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I've never even found a way to get arp or nmap to get close to Advanced IP Scanner", "excerpt": "This looks great! I've been searching for something like this for ever. Some feedback of what I found on my network, as compared to some other scanners I've used. I've never seen anything that can beat Advanced IP Scanner at finding hostnames. I've never even found a way to get arp or nmap to get close to Advanced IP Scanner; I've tried dozens of suggested commands of each, all with no luck. Here's the results of my ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Whosthere: A LAN discovery tool with a modern TUI, written in Go"}, {"id": 737463872, "item_id": 46091492, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46091492", "by": "0134340", "date": "2025-11-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Do you mean something like nmap's network topolgy view?", "excerpt": "Do you mean something like nmap's network topolgy view? https://nmap.org/book/zenmap-topology.html Just for visualizing network topology on Linux, there's a lot of tools.", "context": "", "use_case": "Network topology visualization", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Network Monitor \u2013 a GUI to spot anomalous connections on your Linux"}, {"id": 737091329, "item_id": 46068208, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46068208", "by": "paul2495", "date": "2025-11-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "run an Nmap scan", "excerpt": "Hey HN, As a security analyst, a typical workflow for me was a frustrating juggling act: run an Nmap scan, manually parse the output, search for CVEs, find an exploit script, set up a listener in Metasploit, and then finally launch the exploit. I was drowning in terminal windows and context-switching, and I knew there had to be a better way. So, I built Syd: a desktop assistant that acts as an intelligent front-end f", "context": "", "use_case": "network scanning", "switched_from": "", "story": "I got tired of juggling security tools,so I built an AI copilot to do it for me"}, {"id": 736520482, "item_id": 46032530, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46032530", "by": "paul2495", "date": "2025-11-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Core features working: YARA, Nmap, Volatility, Metasploit", "excerpt": "Really appreciate the detailed feedback\u2014this is exactly what I need to hear. GPU/CPU question: Yes, Syd supports both. It auto-detects CUDA if available and falls back to CPU if not. With GPU (tested on RTX 3060), inference runs at 30-50 tokens/sec. On CPU it drops to 5-10 tokens/sec, which is usable but noticeably slower for larger responses. The model is quantized (Q4_K_M) to keep VRAM requirements reasonable(6GB).", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Syd \u2013 An offline-first, AI-augmented workstation for blue teams"}]}