My first impression of the site is that no big value jumps out at me when I look at it -- nothing makes me think, "Hey, this is really a lot better than trawling Google News and the Yahoo! Most Popular page, plus a few niche sites I find interesting."
Also, "Interesting things to read" is a little ambiguous, and could use clarification to emphasize that the site _does_ cover both news and reference texts. (Or is it even more than that?) With so much flat-looking text, people are going to read one link and think, "This is just another less-attractive version of Google News," or, "This is just another link aggregator site, but without arrows for some reason."
Somehow, you've got to make your front-page impression for non-logged-in users both provide a little bit of value (but not the many links you're putting up right now), _and_ immediately and visually demonstrate what makes your site uniquely valuable.
The list format feels a little oppressive, for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but it just isn't ... fun.
Finally, all the links I see initially are about equally interesting to me -- they're all fairly heady math/computer geek stuff. So I don't even get the initial reward of trimming away (or the fun of condemning) the really trivial stuff I wish wasn't in the news. I wonder if someone in the 99% of the U.S. population that doesn't care about Boltzmann machines would even try to push past that.
I signed up for your site a while ago so I'd like to share my thoughts.
Design wise the site is a bit dull, but passable. The text is unbelievably hard to read (on Windows/Firefox, default font size). I'm guessing you use Mac or Linux, otherwise you would never have launched with that font.
I originally signed up because the site had the promise of a good recommendation engine. That's something that others have promised (Jaanix, reddit) but no one has really delivered on. If you have got something that you think is unique then tell people about it. I even visited the about page on my first session, trying to find what made your page different. I still don't know.
The biggest problem was with the content. When I first visited most links on the front page seemed to be on machine learning/AI. I guess that probably is because of the interests of the initial users, but I don't need a whole page of links on the same topic. If possible a mix of article types would be good; I found most links were just Wikipedia articles.
Finally, I'm not sure how I feel about the rating system. Other sites have two ratings for a reason. It is much harder to choose between 10 options and breaks up the flow.
I remember that and I think it is interesting. I have bookmarked it, but somehow I did not check back often. For one thing, I am busy keeping up with Hacker News. But maybe there are other things at work - perhaps you just need to improve the design a bit, and give it more of a community feel (ie make it clear what it is all about)?
If the URL is too embarrassing to admit to... well, there's your problem!