I know it's really out of the question because of the amount of additional load it would create, but in some ways I'd like to have a more personalised home page. If I could just configure it with a:
Are those the topics you're interested in or the ones that you don't want to see? I'm not sure if your example uses command-line argument syntax or search engine query syntax...
I do like the idea, btw. The difficulty most likely is accurately categorizing articles. I know /. added tagging at some point but I'm not sure if that ended up actually being useful.
-objective-c, -java, -hotz, -raises, -acquisition, -node.js, -drm -"considered harmful" (etc)
that would probably give me a 70% better home page.