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nomilk 1 days ago [-]
For those who aren't aware, the CIA World Factbook was a bit like a modern day atlas with many well-sourced headline statistics about each and every country. Things like it's political structure, religion, economy, population, history etc.
I missed it recently when wanting to compare government revenue and expenditure for several countries. Without it, I didn't bother as I'd have to look figures up manually through each respective country's own budget website, and ensure figures were like-for-like (which they rarely are), and doing this for each country each with its own conventions is prohibitively tedious. Therein lies the value of Factbook; all that miserable distillation work was done for us.
The rationale for defunding was 'why should the US tax-payer fund something that's equally valuable for everyone in the world'. I think that's fair. But I lament its removal and wish the US could rattle the tin so other countries chip in and bring it back.
somat 1 days ago [-]
I always figured the answer was that the information was for the US Taxpayer, and if other countries would like to use it. well, it is not for them, but if they can get access, fine, The effort required to try and keep them out is not worth it.
Sort of the same reason US government works end up in the public domain "This work was funded by the US citizens and as such it is owned by the US citizens(in the public domain), it is too much hassle to try and prevent non-US citizens access so if they can get a copy they are free to use it as well"
I liked the idea of having the intelligence agency maintain a public intelligence encyclopedia for it's citizens. Sort of how the geological survey provides public maps and earthquake alerts.
Cpoll 19 hours ago [-]
Even more than that, anything to keep people out will also block some legitimate users.
There's also some propaganda power in maintaining a widely-cited encyclopedia (and maybe a psyops angle).
autuni 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think the rationale makes sense. If you want to provide a free resource why not just provide it for free for everyone, considering it doesn't even cost anything because downloads/online lookups are not a limited resource. Not everything has to be in "competition" with other countries. The whole mindset that if it doesn't give enough of an advantage to one countries people over everyone else means it shouldn't be done at all is very weird.
mihaaly 20 hours ago [-]
> I think that's fair.
Terminating it for US citizens as well so no-one else can have it? That's more like small.
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
I never found it particularly useful but the CIA World Factbook seemed to have originated with some of the "country orientation guides" that the US DoD used to prepare in printed form for military service members being posted to weird locations. There's historical "Welcome to South Korea!" type documents that make an attempt to orient "never traveled outside of the USA before" type Americans to cultural and regionally specific things in Japan, South Korea, Germany, etc. The CIA World Factbook was just a more structured encylopedia like version of the same.
edit: There was absolutely nothing "CIA" specific or sensitive about it whatsoever, it was basically like if you paid some government employees to attempt a job similar to the mid 1980s era Encylopedia Britannica. Maybe with a bit more emphasis on public statistics like literacy rate, percent of houses with telephones, economic statistics, other basic public stats that governments are known to publish.
What happened to the CIA world factbook? It was great.
serf 1 days ago [-]
"On February 4, 2026, following the restriction and closure since 2025 of other government-funded information websites, the CIA announced, with no warning and no explanation, that The World Factbook was discontinued."[0]
Freedom In the world stat and couple of others - boundaries and value don't match; says 1-7 1 is the best but listed value is between 1 and 100
Keyframe 1 days ago [-]
The internet was so fucking great up until around the time facebook showed up and became overbearing. Starting with an era of 'multimedia' CD-ROMs and first wave of internet, through the second wave of internet around the dotcom era and the third era of "AJAX" it felt really open, accessible, full of everything.
I can't tell for sure what happened around 2005 or so, youtube spawned up as well and it seemed for a while it was going great and then things started dying off, getting walled-in and dying within those walls as well.. I don't know how it happened, maybe as Hemingway put it - two ways. gradually, then suddenly.
Factbook was one such place that carried memories of ye olde past.
Also, CIA FACTbook, not CIA FACEbook, although when you think about it and In-Q-Tel lol.
MrDrMcCoy 1 days ago [-]
Feature request: include the source and date last updated for all information fields.
erikig 1 days ago [-]
Thank you for including data sources as well as some basic data analysis. The scatter plots are quite helpful in analyzing some demographic assumptions that often arise when discussing economic and social development.
You’ve earned yourself a bookmark :)
expedition32 21 hours ago [-]
The US is a country that has some of the best experts in the world. Sadly nobody ever listens to them.
Because America has a hammer which makes everything a nail.
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
You know what else they killed? The SIGAR.mil website (special inspector general for afghan reconstruction), the congressionally chartered oversight/audit entity that had a very well laid out website with chronological ordered list of every document that the SIGAR had ever produced. But no, let's sweep it under the rug.
All of its PDF are still out there in the public domain, just scattered and not well organized in a single set of tabular pages. Here's its final report for an example of what it did.
I have absolutely zero compunctions against engaging in a personal attack against someone who defends livestreaming a public execution. Have a nice day, guy.
Request for higher contrast please for my old eyes.
decafbad 1 days ago [-]
Pale-grey on white. There are many websites like this. Why on earth?
darkreader.org helps.
decafbad 1 days ago [-]
Hacker News is worse by the way.
PostOnce 1 days ago [-]
This is because Claude made them, and Claude doesn't have eyeballs.
Low effort looks like low effort, even if you have an AI helping.
PostOnce 1 days ago [-]
Too late to edit to clarify:
I mean Claude literally does not have eyeballs, it cannot feel discomfort, it does not need to squint, it cannot be annoyed by low contrast, and it cannot desire something better, it will not seek to improve this unprompted as a human would to "scratch its own itch".
tough 21 hours ago [-]
there's linting for contrast btw
PostOnce 20 hours ago [-]
For that to matter, the user has to bother setting it up, but the user is too lazy to do that, the user doesn't want to do anything at all, which is why they asked Claude to do it
tough 20 hours ago [-]
I understand how this is true for like 99% of users, but there might be users of Claude who care too, right?
PostOnce 6 hours ago [-]
Of course, and if it were those users, we wouldn't have noticed
but it's the 99% that don't care who are responsible for the low contrast websites we're talking about
Those 99% are going to make it harder to find the good 1%, too
c'est la vie
dang 21 hours ago [-]
[stub for offtopicness]
TZubiri 1 days ago [-]
*Factbook
k310 2 days ago [-]
Factbook, please.
1 days ago [-]
ulfw 1 days ago [-]
Last thing I want is another Facebook
xnx 1 days ago [-]
Title does not match page and title says "Facebook" instead of "Factbook".
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
CIA World Freudian Slip
mindcrime 1 days ago [-]
"CIA World Facebook"--> Is that a code name for PRISM or ECHELON or whatever??
klodolph 1 days ago [-]
It was a literal factbook online. In high school, I remember using it to look up facts like the area or population of different countries.
cwnyth 1 days ago [-]
The title of this submission says "Facebook", not "Factbook". That's what they were referring to.
lostlogin 1 days ago [-]
I feel a bit twitchy remembering the pain of trying to do the references right for websites back then.
MrDrMcCoy 1 days ago [-]
No, it was a guidebook anyone could use for just about every country. It well predates PRISM, and was well regarded until it was discontinued.
lmz 1 days ago [-]
That was the factbook
marcelo-earth 1 days ago [-]
I had to read it twice times. It has always been cited on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember.
nomilk 1 days ago [-]
It's a typo in the HN title which should be corrected. Should be World Factbook; nothing to do with Facebook.
ButlerianJihad 1 days ago [-]
Freudian Slip. Everyone knows that Facebook is Five Eyes Book/Mossadbook
tty456 1 days ago [-]
I thought it was a site exposing CIA undercover agents
penskymaterial 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
alexgartrell 1 days ago [-]
new account, obvious troll
dudeinjapan 1 days ago [-]
CIA Factbook was mundane things like population, land area, system of govt, major exports, etc. Stuff that is now on the right-hand sidebar of Wikipedia. Presumably it was made for US govt employees to have a basic understanding of other countries. It was useful to do a 7th grade research report on Uzbekistan circa 1997.
I missed it recently when wanting to compare government revenue and expenditure for several countries. Without it, I didn't bother as I'd have to look figures up manually through each respective country's own budget website, and ensure figures were like-for-like (which they rarely are), and doing this for each country each with its own conventions is prohibitively tedious. Therein lies the value of Factbook; all that miserable distillation work was done for us.
The rationale for defunding was 'why should the US tax-payer fund something that's equally valuable for everyone in the world'. I think that's fair. But I lament its removal and wish the US could rattle the tin so other countries chip in and bring it back.
Sort of the same reason US government works end up in the public domain "This work was funded by the US citizens and as such it is owned by the US citizens(in the public domain), it is too much hassle to try and prevent non-US citizens access so if they can get a copy they are free to use it as well"
I liked the idea of having the intelligence agency maintain a public intelligence encyclopedia for it's citizens. Sort of how the geological survey provides public maps and earthquake alerts.
There's also some propaganda power in maintaining a widely-cited encyclopedia (and maybe a psyops angle).
Terminating it for US citizens as well so no-one else can have it? That's more like small.
edit: There was absolutely nothing "CIA" specific or sensitive about it whatsoever, it was basically like if you paid some government employees to attempt a job similar to the mid 1980s era Encylopedia Britannica. Maybe with a bit more emphasis on public statistics like literacy rate, percent of houses with telephones, economic statistics, other basic public stats that governments are known to publish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
this is the new open source site:
https://openfactbook.org/
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
Maybe @dang can fix the autocorecto
(p.s. @dang doesn't work - I just saw this randomly. If you want semi-reliable message delivery, hn@ycombinator.com is the only thing that works.)
https://archive.org/download/factbook-2020
I can't tell for sure what happened around 2005 or so, youtube spawned up as well and it seemed for a while it was going great and then things started dying off, getting walled-in and dying within those walls as well.. I don't know how it happened, maybe as Hemingway put it - two ways. gradually, then suddenly.
Factbook was one such place that carried memories of ye olde past.
Also, CIA FACTbook, not CIA FACEbook, although when you think about it and In-Q-Tel lol.
You’ve earned yourself a bookmark :)
Because America has a hammer which makes everything a nail.
All of its PDF are still out there in the public domain, just scattered and not well organized in a single set of tabular pages. Here's its final report for an example of what it did.
https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2145129/sigar-final-repor...
Source? (I know nothing about this, so I'm just trying to establish facts.)
> This is what happens when you get your facts from Reddit
Don't do this.
https://youngkim.house.gov/2024/11/08/reps-kim-crow-lead-bil...
> In June 2024, the Office of the SIGAR submitted a sunset plan to ensure a smooth shutdown process and effective and timely transfer
[1] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/sigar...
[2] https://legis1.com/news/afghanistan-reconstruction-failure-c...
https://worldfactbookarchive.org/
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114530)
darkreader.org helps.
Low effort looks like low effort, even if you have an AI helping.
I mean Claude literally does not have eyeballs, it cannot feel discomfort, it does not need to squint, it cannot be annoyed by low contrast, and it cannot desire something better, it will not seek to improve this unprompted as a human would to "scratch its own itch".
but it's the 99% that don't care who are responsible for the low contrast websites we're talking about
Those 99% are going to make it harder to find the good 1%, too
c'est la vie