  New Paul Graham article! Yay! He rocks...he's the guy who wrote the article urlLink Hackers and Painters and now he has a new one called urlLink Great Hackers . He makes a lot of good points about how to spot a good programmer and how hard that is until you've actually coded with her/him. Which is very true...we're trying to hire someone in our lab, and the hardest thing is to tell when someone is great. It's easy to spot good from bad, but great is hard to find without actually sitting down with someone and seeing how they solve some problems and approach coding. And just looking at code is not enough...because a lot of the art in coding is how you get there and how you solve the problem...just as much or more than what the final results is. If any of you haven't read the original Hackers and Painters, you should! It's an interesting look at how writing good code is more like painting or architecture than anything else.
Which I totally think is true. It's about being creative within bounds and thinking different. It's about trying, sketching, revising, improving, and doing it all so that it fits the tastes and needs of the people who are going to use it. 
