Firebug firebug firebug: http://www.getfirebug.com/

This brilliant Firefox extension is how I learned CSS. Click the "inspect" button, then click any page element, and it'll show you all the CSS rules being applied to that element. It'll also highlight the margin+padding so you can wrap your head around the box model.

Best of all, you can change CSS properties on the fly. Naturally, the best way to learn is to hack up someone else's CSS, so go to a site you like the looks of, and play with the styling.

Soon, you'll be thinking to yourself "man, this isn't complicated at all!"

And then you will open your page in IE 6.

And then you will punch a hole in the wall.

Has "spritz" taken on a new slang meaning? From what I remember (as does the dictionary) it means carbonated water.

> once you do that 2 or 3 times very well, either you graduate into something tougher and better or you're just like a stupid little dog chasing a fake rabbit around a racetrack

Does this apply just to the tech industry? Or would you say that artists, architects, and novelists should move on to a new profession once they produce a few good works?

Maybe J.K. Rowling should have stopped after the 3rd Harry Potter book. She was already a popular and financial success by then.

I would first make a distinction between CSS and UI design. You can make sucky UIs in CSS and you can make great UIs without CSS.

UI design is really more of a set of beliefs than coding.

Start by reading Defensive Web Design for the Web by 37Signals guys.

Jakob Nielsen's useit.com alertbox articles are a great place to start too-- http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ Back in high school I printed all his useit.com articles at the library printer and compiled it neatly in a binder:)

Also checkout Jakob Nielsen's Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed.

+1 for both slime and git

Look. I don't mind being wrong, but I just don't think you're understanding what I'm saying.

Beethoven started out as a keyboardist, sure. His father made him practice like crazy. At first he was a great performer of other people's works, not a composer. He received some acclaim as a performer and went to Vienna. At Vienna he was supposed to develop his composition skills. Hayden took him under his wing, and let's just say things didn't work out. Ignoring all his other great works (if such a thing is possible!) and concentrating on his symphonies, you can see where he started in the classical form and eventually blew the doors off of it, substituting motif development for the typical lyrical development of the time. His use of rhythm and instrumentation (including a chorus in the ninth) was completely unheard of. Music critics attending his symphonies for the first time were outraged. He was taking a field and innovating. The place he took the symphony, for instance, was somewhere the day-to-day practitioners of the time would never have went.

Glad to continue the historical bantering if you find it productive.

You ask for me to explain redefining writing? Sure as heck it's an ambiguous statement. That's the whole point! We can't see where the field can go because we're not practitioners at the top of our game. That's the purpose of pushing forward. It's not a question that has an answer that I can provide.

Interesting that you would choose Shakespeare as writing schlock. In fact, he did write a lot of stuff that was considered pulp at the time, but not only was his works popular with the masses and sometimes low-brow, he was also cutting-edge. His use of language and meter was, once again, unheard of. I could start listing all the new phrases he came up with that are common today, like "into thin air." Geesh! He coined over 2000 new words! He started a completely new way of constructing sentences in English. Shakespeare was probably more radical than any writer since him, yet he also appealed to the masses. You don't have to choose between popular and innovative. Sorry if I represented it as such.

Of course, Beethoven could have stayed with Hayden and wrote Baroque material his entire life. Shakespeare could have used the common vernacular and still been a very successful writer. There's nothing wrong with just wanting to do one thing the best you can. But doing "the best you can" to me means trying to change the world, not just plodding along in it.

jQuery.

Any list with The Secret on it can't be a serious good list of books.

there's this: http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/

Build = play.

I highly recommend NOT reading the W3C spec to start out if you actually want to get anywhere.

Just dive in and start coding, CSS isn't really all that hard.

I found it really useful/fun to just copy another site (e.g. Facebook or Digg) to get a hang of how things work. If you get stuck you can always take a look at their CSS using Firebug or by opening up their stylesheet in the browser.

None of my business, but this guy needs to take a spritz. I know it's fun being wonderboy and all, but once you do that 2 or 3 times very well, either you graduate into something tougher and better or you're just like a stupid little dog chasing a fake rabbit around a racetrack.

If I were him, I'd see if I could train a dozen startups at once, like YC. If that sounds too easy, try 20, or 40. I guess as a software architect I'm always looking for that next higher level of generalization. Once you do it a few times -- time to move on.

If startups are mostly luck, then this guy sounds like a habitual gambler. If they are mostly skill, then he's stuck in a rut. Either way, I hope he's not doing the same thing ten years from now. That'd be sad.

"nothing's truly private anymore"

Maybe for you.

I use one credit card (with a $50 fraud limit), no one knows my SSN except the IRS and my employer, no one has my bank info except me and my bank, and six people have my cell phone#.

Just because there's a new Web 2.0 fad doesn't mean you have to join. Just because you join doesn't mean you have to divulge private info.

"you just have to trust that the people viewing your data is honest"

Famous last words.

Is 25 enough? http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

"First of I am not a hacker, so I can clearly see things you guys can't (vis versa). Stop building cool things and build something useful for the 95% of us who don't know how to."

I am a hacker.

I am also an adult and therefore I actively choose what to do with my time and what to build, and whether to build something cool, useful, both or neither.

What I really don't need is inarticulate people who haven't demonstrated any particular expertise in anything giving me advice on what to build and how I should spend <b>my</b> time and resources.

Now go away and do something useful.

As you said, "Sorry if I offended you .. , don't take it personally."

The best Scheme IDE probably is DrScheme (plt-scheme.org)

I feel like I've read this article before. That would be at least once last year, and a few times in the 90s.

that's what I was reffering to when I wrote "search with google and site:news.ycombinator.com"