I'm not knocking hacker news at all. My point though was that let's say you only want to read articles that are counterintuitive, contrary to your current beliefs, contain facts that you don't already know, etc. With enough computing power and a little human mediation this should be doable, but it's not something you can get from sites like HN currently.
Overall, I agree with you. It should be possible to define some objective criteria about what is interesting, and then some algorithm could check all the new articles from mainstream dailies, weeklies and monthlies, and return let's say up to 150 articles monthly which should be interesting. That I think could be an useful service.
For example, Vanity Fair has 1 or 2 articles monthly which are interesting, but I don't have time to read VF every month to see if I discover something good...if some algo can do that pre-selection, that would help.
