Perhaps most people reading HN would be able to recognize a good programmer. But there are still challenges when you need to hire someone with area of expertise that is outside of your own - if you're hiring someone to do your own job or your clone, it's straightforward.

For the last two start-ups in which I was involved (as a graphic designer), a co-worker and I were placed in the position of choosing developers to build our application. We were the most technologically savvy people on our start-up team of businessmen, attorney's, accountants, etc. (in many ways those startups followed the inverted timeline of most startups).

At first the only questions we could ask the applicants were... what languages do you know? what projects have you worked on? how would you solve this problem?... as if their answers would inspire some confidence regarding their abilities as a programmer - their answers inspired nothing because WE knew nothing. What I'm saying is that if you are going to hire people, you have to educate yourself to a conversational level+ in their area of expertise.

Nowadays my said co-worker and I both know RoR and are building our own startup apart from that original group. And when we decided to hire another developer we were in a MUCH better position not only to recognize a strong programmer but to leverage our own abilities.

Be wary of his point regarding PASSION. We met with some programmers who were passionate, but were obviously charlatans.