I'm nearly satisfied with Google Reader, but it bothers me that if a lot of stuff starts piling up, I don't know where to start reading it, so mostly HN ends up being my source of things to read.
Is there some kind of RSS reader that would be clever enough to say "I see you have 5000 unread items, here's the 10 items you should read first according to common opinion / freshness / some magic goodness score".
I don't have time to check all the feeds that have potentially interesting (for me) content, and then browse each feed for actually interesting articles.
There is no way I can discover any significant portion of new interesting feeds, and following a large number of feeds in a reader would make that even worse.
As I told a friend recently, I don't follow blogs anymore, I read HN and let other interesting people lead me to interesting content. The HN comments for articles are always much more useful than the articles' local comments.
That said, I do use the Brief reader, a Firefox plugin. If I find something extra interesting on HN, I will add it to Brief and follow it for awhile. Almost nothing is spongeworthy enough to stay in Brief more than a month or two.
In Brief I currently have: - HN (sometimes I read it there, sometimes directly) - one local news feed - the feed for the Denver Post obituaries (they write interesting stories) - a feed from CrossFit - about five feeds of steadily diminishing spongeworthiness