Seems like a cool idea but have you considered what role your popularity plays in all of it? I consider myself a casual visitor to HN and more of a lurker than anything yet I still recognize your site immediately meaning you've gained traction with random folk like myself let alone more hardcore members.

I'm agree, the same happens to me, it may be that He's kind of charismatic, and his posts are easy and fun to read.So it's easier for his hacks to get popular. But we shouldn't diminish that his hack is simple and interesting. simple + interesting = viral

Yes you're right. My post came off with a different tone than I intended as I didn't want to state that it isn't a sweet product. I think its a rather cool idea and surprised it wasn't done previously.

I know who Zach is, but I didn't realise spark was written by him - I just liked it because it was clearly explained and both fun and obviously useful.

"I wrote spark in bash shell. From the start, this gave me a huge audience."

It also helps to be a prominent employee and user of a central developer community, with over 800 followers.

To clarify, over 800 followers on github. Over 10,000 followers on twitter.

From "Hack" to "Popular Project"? So, what, Linus and his Linux kernel? ;)

This is the same process that happened to me when I created http://dummyimage.com (Complete history of the project: http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/the-history-of-dummyimag...)

The funny thing is my project laid dormant for years until a friend of mine shared it here on HackerNews.

The harder problem for me is to find a good "Hack" :/

Meet SparkBotMe (SparkBot is taken by an evil robot creator).

SparkBotMe is a twitter account that will graph your mention. simply @SparkBotMe a comma seperated list of numbers and it will reply with a graph

I wonder how he even got the idea to create something like spark. It's such a "unique" project. I wonder if he has a list of ideas or it just came to him spur of the moment.

He probably read the really beautiful paper by Edward Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...), maybe played with a sparkline generator from the command line, and at some point made the all-command-line connection.

Are there any popular systems that ship with bash, but not Python & Ruby? It seems like a slightly odd decision to me.

I would guess that a fair number of Linux distros don't ship with a Ruby interpreter installed. (It would obviously be trivial to install one using apt-get or yum or whatever, but it's not already installed.) Perl is there because it's long been considered a kind of extended shell-scripting language. Python's probably in most places because so many GTK/Gnome apps depend on it. But I'm not sure if Ruby is (yet) part of standard builds.

Wine is written for sh, if that's the kind of project/system you mean.

Fun, little, and mind-rewarding. That's just how hacks should be. I found what I'll be doing this afternoon.