I'm using Google Reader for mostly personal blogs but visit sites like HN directly since they tend to clutter my whole feed reader. I had subscribed to the HN feed for a long time but since the feed displays every blog post that hits the frontpage there were a lot of uninteresting entries.

I would re-subscribe to the HN feed if there were some option for a feed which only displays entries with X upvotes and/or X comments (and X could be specified in the options).

The general problem with subscribing to the feed is that I don't see which entries are popular and which not because stories tend to hit the frontpage rather fast on HN compared to other big sites.

For now, I just visit HN and click on a few stories on the frontpage (mostly these with many comments or upvotes).