I use proxies to filter my news. Proxies are people like you and every other user of Reddit and HN. These people help me by voting on what stories they think are important. For example, I never go to TechCrunch on my own. Occasionally there will be an interesting article there, and it will show up on HN. It's using the wisdom of the crowd to filter the thousands of articles that are written every day.
Instead of saving stuff to read later, when I want to read something I go to HN and check what's currently on top. I'll almost always find something interesting, and if I check about ounce a day I don't miss much.
This is a great idea. But I find that the churn rate for HN is quite high in comparison to reddit, and I need to check HN quite a few times a day to not miss interesting stuff. Also, though this case is probably rare given the shared interests of HN and subreddits, it's still possible that you could miss out on something that you would have potentially found interesting, but the majority did not.
Instead of saving stuff to read later, when I want to read something I go to HN and check what's currently on top. I'll almost always find something interesting, and if I check about ounce a day I don't miss much.