How about just Hacker News, expanded with some machine learning to determine the topics I would be interested in. My 'friends' or connections don't supply me with nearly enough of the posts and news items that catch my interest, whereas I trust HN to float up things of interest (and not pure trash), so can I just base my feed on your posts?
Maybe you could use all the HN links you comment on and upvote as signals, classify the links into categories, then surface new links from those categories in a "for you" personalized HN feed. You probably need more signals to make it work well, like how much time you spend looking at those links.
