The biggest giveaway is that there are no projects which are just for fun.
Incidentally, I've observed that the "just for fun" projects is a good trick for identifying a serious economist as well. A real economist Tyler Cowen obsesses over the economics of finding good restaurants and whatever else tickles his fancy, whereas a pretender like Krugman is all serious policy issues (both examples of economists who's policy I tend to disagree with).
[edit: just noticed someone downmodded you. WTF, how does your valuable correction to my comment deserve a downvote?!?]
Fake or not, sounds hirable.
Sounds pretty standard graduate fare, but can they solve an actual coding problem with me? I don't mind what language they use, and they can have any IDE from a pencil and paper to a modern autocompleting behemoth.
Honestly though, this gives a decent three step template for how to get yourself on the top of the pile in about ~1-5h worth of work:
1. Register a GitHub account, fork some projects that look cool
2. Register a domain, set up a yourname.github.com page for hosting, and add your contact info and link to github, whatever. Set up a mail redirector.
3. Upload your own project. If you don't have one, probably a good idea is to replicate some basic utility. How about pretty printing JSON using python from the command line?
Bam! Passion, done. For extra credit, create a blog and write two-three posts on why Java is verbose, something on getting started with node.js on your machine and a benchmark of your json utility and another one.
In all sincerity, when I look at candidates I also look hard for passion, and a blog, github, stackoverflow, etc puts them at the top of the pile.
As a counter anecdote, I've worked with tons of really, really good developers who went home at five, and came in at nine, and brought it every day. For most of them, life happened and with two kids it's harder to be prolific or show resume-friendly passion.
On the other hand, I doubt any of them will ever need to send in a resume anyway.