HN Reader

I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.

If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.g...

Most volunteers on Wikipedia do an excellent job, but sometimes the absence of traditional editorial structures shows its limitations.

In its own FAQs[0], the CIA previously noted that many third-party companies that once provided free data now require expensive subscriptions or restrict use via licensing. These likely made it increasingly difficult to maintain the Factbook’s rigorous standards for comprehensive global data.

Ensuring the accuracy of thousands of data points for 258 international entities required a "monstrous workload" of vetting and reviewing by highly trained officers. Given the "do more with less" mandate, this is the result.

[0]https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/

This ending seems fitting for the world where artificially manufacturing consent is rampant.

As Nietzsche once said: "There are no facts, only interpretations"

Discussed a few days ago as well

What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"

George Orwell (1984)

where we're going, we don't need "facts"

Not that that has anything to do with the current administration deciding to kill a useful apolitical resource that has served countless people for 80 years.

I thought the CIA was formed to represent rich people's interests and maybe in that way the Factbook was another trick to lend legitimacy to their organization.

So they do everything they can do get rid of facts.

The primary reason they spread disinformation is not to get people to believe the nonsense (which is merely an occasional bonus), it is to get people to give up on finding the truth. Once people have no substantial quantity or quality of truth, they can be entirely manipulated.

This regime is following the standard path to authoritarianism.

As an example in recent memory: the World Factbook has been heavily cited lately to argue against the idea of a genocide in Gaza. Maybe a year or so ago, the Factbook was updated, and it claimed that the population in Gaza had grown: no decrease, no inflection point in growth, nothing to see... That claim was in heavy rotation, as soon as it was published.

That the espionage agency of the main weapons supplier to Israel would publish such a claim felt grotesque, and the claim itself seemed ridiculous, impossible, based on even evidenced peripheral information (the 90+% of people displaced, the destruction of all hospitals, the deaths of so many aid workers, the levels of starvation), but... the Factbook claimed it, so it became true to many.

It would be impossible to quantify the effect of this, how many days of horror it added, how many more debates those trying to stop the killing had to do, how much fewer donations were sent to aid workers. But an effect it certainly had.