I always find this interesting on Hacker News that a post like this, which appears witty, has so many upvotes, and that 'thwarted' just posted this response to another post:
As a musician you get this all the time as well... the songs you're most proud of play to deafening silence while the songs that could never be said to have been inspired leave the house on their feet, shedding tears and yodeling.
People in groups may feel warm&fuzzy&nice but until we can get the same kind of bandwidth between our respective heads as we can inside our heads all group consciousness will remain anathema for excellence.
For intelligence I go to be by myself or seek out the company of other specialists.
How to make a Smalltalk VM.
1) Implement a loop containing a 256 case case-statement. Get ahold of documentation of the Smalltalk bytecodes, then start implmenting each one.
2) Code up method loookup. (Really, you've done this if you've done step 1, but it deserves mention.)
3) Add code for loading and saving an image.
4) Add a library for Garbage Collection: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/
Done! You don't need a Smalltalk compiler in your VM. It's all Smalltalk objects in the image!