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.
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.
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.
"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]
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
According to the wikipedia article,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
this is the new open source site:
https://openfactbook.org/
What happened to the CIA world factbook? It was great.
"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]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
Do we have a credible source tying this to DOGE?
No, but CNN linked its shutdown to budget cuts (also mentioned on the Wikipedia page).
It got spellchecked into the boards
Maybe @dang can fix the autocorecto
Yes, we've defaced it now.
(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.)
The most recently archived (meaning last) one seems to be 2020. 367 MB.
https://archive.org/download/factbook-2020
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
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.
https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2145129/sigar-final-repor...
Feature request: include the source and date last updated for all information fields.
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 :)
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.
Another take from 8 months ago
https://worldfactbookarchive.org/
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114530)
[stub for offtopicness]
*Factbook
Request for higher contrast please for my old eyes.
Pale-grey on white. There are many websites like this. Why on earth?
darkreader.org helps.
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.
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".
Hacker News is worse by the way.