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Comment by akincisor | Hacker News Reader

Can we get a canonical url for this? It's a useful resource, but in its current form might disappear at any time.

That's an interesting suggestion, thanks. Certainly worth looking into. In the meantime, you can consider the newsletter's landing page to be a canonical URL of sorts — it will always link to the structured archive: https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural

Just open it in regular Docs form (replace /htmlview... with /edit):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4jucl...

and go to "File > Download as..." and pick your desired format!

It's a little funny that someone so invested in public and open datasets would embed their own data in a Google Spreadsheet.

Serious question: what do you think would be the better alternative? Especially when factoring in ease-of-upkeep (for the creator), convenient and familiar interface for the majority of users, Google's generally good uptime and server performance, and that a Google Sheet set to public access is not closed by a reasonable definition of that word.

I was going to quip about how I am annoyed that Google removed download-as-a-CSV as a URL endpoint, but it appears I misheard about this because /export?format=csv still turns the Google Sheet URL into a direct download link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZhPLMCHKJvwOkP4jucl...

I personally didn't find it easy to consume, and others here didn't either (see the confusion about what it is, asking for context, etc). The links aren't clickable, there are multiple newline-separated links in a single cell, etc.

I'm not just objecting to the use of Google; part of an open dataset is its ease of use.

As for alternatives, I agree, it's hard to rival Google Sheets in terms of the creator's time. But again, for someone invested in curating open datasets, I'd hope for a bit of time invested in curating their own data — even if it remains within Google sheets.

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