February 22, 2026
CIA facts, internet reacts
Show HN: CIA World Factbook Archive (1990–2025), searchable and exportable
Hacker nerds build CIA world data time machine… then immediately start roasting its bugs
TLDR: A developer turned 36 years of CIA World Factbook data into a public, searchable archive, but commenters instantly started finding broken country links, wonky charts, and suspicious-looking global stats. People love the idea, fear the original data may vanish, and are gleefully stress‑testing every inch of it.
Someone just turned 36 years of CIA World Factbook data into a shiny, searchable world history machine — and the internet did what it does best: immediately broke it. While the creator proudly shows off maps, charts and country dossiers, one user discovers that clicking on “Germany” dumps you into… The Gambia. Cue instant chaos and a new running joke about the CIA not knowing where Berlin is.
Another commenter pokes around the global stats and claims the world’s population graph looks “double counted”, sparking a mini panic that the site may have accidentally invented 4 billion extra people. Others pile on with bug reports about weird charts that “need to be normalized” — tech-speak for “these graphs are lying to my eyes.”
There’s also a darker twist: one user asks if this is basically a rescue mission for a government resource being quietly shut down by the current White House, turning the thread into part spy thriller, part open-data vigil. And in true internet fashion, while some are nitpicking broken links and math errors, others are just flexing that they already know when the next CIA factbook is dropping on Amazon. The vibe: incredible project, amazing potential, but the crowd is here for every glitch, typo, and conspiracy-flavored side quest.
Key Points
- •The project archives all CIA World Factbook editions from 1990–2025 into a structured, searchable database covering 281 entities and 9,500 country-year records.
- •The archive includes 1,061,341 parsed data fields and allows users to view raw field data exactly as published in each annual edition.
- •A Factbook Archive (reference library) provides browsing by year, full-text search with Z39.58 syntax, country profiles, field time series, quizzes, and print-ready exports.
- •An Intelligence Analysis workspace offers regional dashboards by DoD combatant command regions, choropleth and timeline maps, country comparisons, global rankings, and trend analysis tools.
- •The project states that all data is from the public-domain CIA World Factbook, follows ICD 203 analytic standards, and is not affiliated with the CIA or the U.S. Government; source code is available via GitHub.