I've sneakily been using this for months on Hacker News itself- I just .hide() stories past around story #15. More signal, less noise. And it's just jQuery, so it's really easy to whip up.
It's interesting how perspectives differ on what is considered noise. On the average day I start my browsing here around link 15, or even the new queue.
You're pretty much guaranteed to hear of anything hitting the front page anyway if it was meaningful to begin with. If not, it's probably some momentary obsession or buzzword bingo (say, "Google", "Social", "Facebook killer", "Privacy", "Product launch" to take an ephemeral example :))
I quickly scan
http://hckrnews.com/
which makes sure I don't miss any upvoted story. It does have a lot of noise, but going through 20 or so articles since last time i looked doesn't take that long
Bonus points for it being so easy to share, too: https://github.com/holman/holman-js/blob/master/news.ycombin...