What I resort to doing on bursts of high HN reading (such as now, at lunch) is to command+click each link that looks mildly interesting and go through a few pages.
This site is too frustrating to use any other way, and for a community with so many engineers, I'm still shocked that so many (including myself) put up with it.
The only reason any of us put up with it is the community.
It doesn't matter how many engineers there are here, it's Paul Graham's forum and he seems unwilling to fix these sorts of issues. There have been several threads where I've seen offers to fix it.
This site is too frustrating to use any other way, and for a community with so many engineers, I'm still shocked that so many (including myself) put up with it.