Paul Graham has
given a speech (via during the O'Reilly Open Source convention on
great hackers. I thought it was going to be something like a top-10 hackers of all time; but it's actually a howto on using hackers for increasing the wealth of your company. Really.
Some tips: don't make them program in Java (actually, you can't make a hacker do something he doesn't want to; the tip should be read actually as
don't create a project that needs Java and try to hire hackers afterwards) or other lousy languages (thou should use only Perl and Python); give them a good environment, which means actually an environment where hackers can be kept as isolate as possible, and keep them as focused as possible by just leaving them alone.
Problem is, the only way to know if somebody is a good hacker is to work with him/her, which kind of conflicts with the two previous conditions. But never mind it.
