Howdy, I am a developer (PHP, .Net, Ruby) and I have had similar experiences as the author, but I think that he should have highlighted the part where he says "fire fast". That is the best advice that he could ever have given. Let's face it, the majority of web applications today are not a technical challenge that have never been solved before.

Your main advantage will be to take the requirement and break it down into its lowest parts and then hand off those parts to an outsourced developer and if he/she does not deliver exactly to your spec, then end the relationship. Period.

There is a certain amount of luck to it, but just as the author suggests, I recommend first having the developer create a very simple application with requirements that you define and estimate how long it would have taken you (probably no more than a 5 hour task) and if he/she can deliver, then you've got yourself a winner and you can focus on the business and not javascript errors.