I recently spent a bunch of time looking for a basic list of cities & populations for my latest personal project (list of sales tax rates per city: <a href="http://www.sale-tax.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.sale-tax.com</a>) so I'm glad to hear there might be another option. I tried their fact finder website site (<a href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml" rel="nofollow">http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtm...</a>) but it is really difficult to navigate and they cap the number of rows you can download at a time.<p>If anyone else is looking for this kind of data, the 2000 census places file at <a href="http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html</a> is pretty good but has a lot of Census Designated Places (CDPs) which might not line up exactly with towns/villages. I eventually settled on using the data at <a href="http://www.geonames.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.geonames.org</a>. Geonames has a bunch of data but isn't perfect - I've seen misspellings and places without population data. It's not to hard to edit the data on their site though.
Or right now, if you're impatient:<p><a href="http://www.census.gov/developers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.census.gov/developers/</a>
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4076253" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4076253</a>