improving your design skills?
SocialBootstrap: You don't need to learn "everything you can about graphic design."
Your audience is other hackers. They don't care that much about visual goofiness either- you want a clean, minimalist site, then that's what you should have.The one single thing you should do is make your site more READABLE.Right now, this page is too big. Limit the width of a column of text to around 500 px. That will do wonders. I suggest fixing your body to 900px, and then splitting it into two columns- a main content column of 556, and a sidebar of 344. (Golden Ratio always looks nice).Next- typography:
Obviously, stick with web-safe fonts. Arial and other sans-serif used to be the way to go on the web, because low-res screens didn't display serifs very well. But now it's 2010, and all the print people know that for regular text, a serif font is more legible.font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;Beyond that, you need to make the lines the right distance apart. They need enough room to breathe, and paragraph breaks should have as much space between them as they would if there was another line of text there. Something like:p {
font-size: 12px;
line-height: 22px;
margin-bottom: 22px;
}or you can use ems or whatever you like, but notice that line height is a little less that twice the size of the font  size, and that the margin on the bottom of paragraphs is the same as the line-height.If you just did those few things, your content would be immensely more readable.