What is the size of Yemen? (2024)
- ID
- 29136
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 27 Sep 2026, 10:40 AM
- Fetched
- 28 Sep 2026, 1:59 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://theborys.substack.com/p/what-is-the-size-of-yemen
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 28 Sep 2026, 2:00 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersdatabase_learners
What happened
A Substack post traces how the widely cited size of Yemen (555,000 sq km on Google and Wikipedia) appears to descend from a 1991 Yemen Arab Republic statistical yearbook that drew the northern border at the 20th parallel, when the actual Saudi border agreement puts Yemen's northernmost point at the 19th. The author re-measured the borders on Google Maps at roughly 456,000 sq km including Socotra, and separately found that the CIA World Factbook's 527,968 sq km figure first appeared in 1991 as the sum of pre-unification North Yemen (195,000) and South Yemen (332,968) — numbers the author recalculates as 136,000 and (text truncated) respectively. The Hacker News thread drew 227 points and 77 comments.
Why it matters
This is not AI, developer-tooling, or startup news — it has no direct impact on what Malaysian builders ship, and nothing in the text mentions Malaysia or Southeast Asia. Its one transferable lesson is concrete: a single bad measurement from 1991 propagated into the CIA World Factbook, World Bank, UN, Wikipedia, and Google, so if you pull country or geographic figures from a 'reputable' aggregator into a product, that aggregator is likely copying an upstream source rather than independently measuring. Treat it as a data-provenance curiosity, not a priority for the segment.
Discussion angle
If Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, the World Bank and the UN all report the same number, how much of your own data pipeline is actually independent verification versus downstream copying — and which third-party dataset in your stack would you be unable to defend if someone redrew the borders by hand?