This thread is bringing the worst of Hacker News out of the woodwork. The author is not claiming to be a design expert, nor is she publishing a "how to design" guide. She's demonstrating a skill which I think a lot of developers could use: taking Bootstrap, which is a good start for a front end these days, and making it not look like Bootstrap. She even says this in TFA. It's for developers without a designer to make their site look half-decent in half an hour. That's the TITLE.

Since we all like MVPs and demo days here, I would think this is applicable to a lot of people on Hacker News. You want to stand apart from the other ten demoing startups that used Bootstrap as well, don't you? Put a little effort in, which is all she is advocating.

Based on the quality of the majority of the comments here it seems like most people opened it, saw the ugly design of the site which is only publishing her work (she didn't design it), made it a few paragraphs in, then ran back to comment about how articles like this are killing our profession, making them ill, making them cry, or how she shouldn't be giving design advice.

Dreadful. Truly dreadful. You're better people than this.

If a sudden moment of clarity would be a repeatable cure for mental illness, we would not need mental healthcare. Please read up on confirmation bias.

> “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said.

I remember doing that.

> He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

I remember that.

> A few weeks ago, Michael..threatened to kill me

I did that too.

She forgot to mention the time(s) he threatened to run away. (I'd be surprised if he didn't.)

After a marathon of transfers, expulsions, and incidents, I was at the end of the line. My parents interrupted my electronic solipsism for a moment to tell me the truth. It was a long conversation, but it can be summed in a sentence.

"Son, you're out of options, if you want to have a future you need to play nice at this next school."

Maybe I'd been delivered that message in the past, if I was, I don't remember it. This time it clicked for me. I realized that I'd had my fun hurting the faculty of various schools, but if I wanted to see the day after tomorrow, I would need to stop hurting people.

Before I continue on with my story, I would like to share an anecdote about handwriting:

For the longest time my handwriting was awful. My whole life in fact. When I was learning, I had a mean, evil instructor. She would yell at me when I wrote the letters wrong, it really seemed to bother her. So I wrote the letters the wrong way on purpose, because making her mad was more important to me than drawing Latin runes. Eventually I had learned how to handwrite, entirely wrong, out of habit.

As the years passed by, the root of this badness became obscured in other peoples memory. My mom attributed it to mental illness, everyone else did too. But I knew better. I know better. A few months ago, I decided to improve my handwriting. I would pick a font and learn to write in it. There wouldn't be any tutorials of course, I'd just copy the symbols until they looked right.

At first it was just trial and error, I would try and write the symbol the way I saw it on my computer monitor. (The only one that eluded me is that weird 'a' that looks more like an '&'.) Then, once I figured out how to write the symbol, I would practice the motions over and over on paper. I eventually moved on to writing whole sentences, entirely in this new script. Then whole paragraphs. I stopped short of essays, because by then I had basically mastered the points where my current writing lacked.

Then at school I would apply it, even when it was slower than my normal note taking, I would slowly and methodically do my symbols the new way; the right way. Occasionally I would fall back into my old habits, but only for a moment. Slowly I got better, faster. Over the course of days it became a habit. Over the course of weeks it became second nature. Over the course of months it faded into the background.

Back to my story. I knew I couldn't do what I was doing anymore. So I sat myself down and listened to Linkin Park's Breaking the Habit, over and over, on repeat. The problem is that it's stupid easy to threaten to kill people. It's stupid easy to be a terrible person. I decided I didn't want to be that person anymore, partly because I couldn't be.

I got to school, and did the last overtly malicious thing I can think of. (At least, that can be characterized by my earlier behavior.) There was a boy, let's call him Jacob, Jacob had earned a reward for his good behavior. I knew this before he did, because I was in an introductory one on one with the instructor, to explain the rules. She told me to tell him she wanted to tell him something. But not to spoil it.

I went up to him and promptly relayed that he was in major trouble. He went into the head instructors office crying. I hadn't meant to do that. I figured when he heard that he had actually received an award it would lift his spirits even more. It was a pretty stupid idea.

He came out of her office drying his tears, but still sobbing a little. It hurt me to see this. He didn't deserve that, and it was all my fault. I'd ruined what should have been a happy moment in his life. Of course; the instructor had words for me, they were scalding as I remember them. But as I contemplated Jacob, they were just background noise. I cried.

And after that, things got better. I stopped lying, I stopped calling people names, or threatening to blow them up. Occasionally I would fall into my old habits, but I'd rebound. Eventually, I was so well behaved that they couldn't justify keeping me at a specialty school, I was filtered back into the public school system.

I often think about what my younger self would think of me now, I don't think he would like me very much; in fact he might even threaten to kill me. If he did, I'd probably laugh. I'd tell him the truth:

"You can kill me, but that won't solve your problems."

I've come to dread looking in on these threads. It feels like walking into a swarm of wasps. Boy is the content/nastiness ratio low in this one. It makes me sad and, as someone who has spent a lot of time here, ashamed.

To the people making and upvoting these putdowns: you don't come across as caring about design; you appear to care about feeling superior. That is not smart. It is a mean person's idea of what it is to be smart. As HN has acquired a reputation for being a smart place, it has become a mean place.

Do you guys know what "mean", in the sense of "nasty", means? It means common. Look up the root. The more you reinforce your wish to feel smart in this way, the more common you in fact become. It's hard to see this, because self-image is always telling us the opposite, and that feels good — really good. It's the opiate of the jerk.

In my experience, if one really wants to get smarter, one must work on inhibiting this. I was going to offer a tip or two, but who would want them?

Incidentally, these self-appointed protectors of Design against the masses appear to me to be significantly more mediocre in this way than some of the other subgroups here. Perhaps it's sample bias. Or perhaps it's because there's so little objectivity to any of it that one gets a purer strain of identity politics — "Leave Design to the Designers" and all that.

On another note, thanks to the OP for the helpful and playful article!

When did Dell ever try that hard with Android? All these titles make it sound as if they are making a huge business shifting decision. I haven't even heard anything about Dell and Android in like 2 years. I actually thought they gave up on it a long time ago. This sounds like a PR move to make it look as if Windows 8 is "gaining" on Android or something. These PC-to-the-core companies were never serious about making Android devices. They didn't understand it and the devices it had to be on.