I was just wondering if there's a site out there that's like hn but dedicated to art and design instead of tech and science. I saw a few things here about design and typography, but it's mostly tech and science.
...nothing that couldn't be rectified in about 10 minutes of CSS dabbling.
If you're looking for "general art", you're dealing with an incredibly tough subject, because each specific field of art requires just as much focus as the field of computer programming. There are few similarities in technique between composing and popular songwriting and rap, for instance, in the field of music alone. Oil painting and photography and sculpting and weaving are all drastically different. So the only depth you could get on a general art site would be something like "Look at such-and-such pretty thing," unless it was very cleverly designed to allow for more in-depth conversation. Then you'd have to convince those sorts of people to use the site, and some varieties of artists almost routinely avoid the Internet.
Hacker News works because programming is very online-intensive as-is. Art isn't. Making the transition is very hard. I should know: I've made three attempts thus far.
http://www.alistapart.com/ Articles and reference
http://creattica.com/ Social voting on CSS, logos, biz cards etc.
http://typophile.com/ Mostly discussion as far as I can tell.
Creattica is by far my favorite for just browsing. ALA is popular destination for anyone involved in web design.