I wish Hacker News had a wiki somewhere listing the most promising solutions to the top issues hackers care about. So like, best off-the-shelf mesh network hardware, best form of encryption, best $5 microcontroller with usb and/or bluetooth and or wifi, stuff like that.
If I could just get these things cheaply and easily, I would gladly use them. Right now so many of them seem more experimental than ubiquitous.
Reminds me of just after iOS6 was released under NDA in beta, and Apple had their new Maps application. My wife and I were going somewhere at about 5PM and I went to go check the traffic on the route we were headed towards, and there wasn't a byte of data available to figure out what the traffic was like since there were maybe a few dozen phones in a few square miles of where I was that were running iOS6.
I'd be one of the first people in line to install a mesh network at my residence and work, but it would be pretty useless unless there were others contributing, else I'd have a pretty lonely network.
I'm actually not convinced, myself, that they're practical at present (I know that anyone is doing anything with them in the real world, so it's not 100% theoretical, but not the extent or the difficulty or the capabilities...).
Which is to say, I'd also very much like to see such a consolidation of resources.
