If you are frustrated by the quality of the front page on Hacker News, one thing you can do about that is emphasize the positive by visiting the new page

http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

and upvoting the stories that are good. I often see good stories on the new page that never make it to the front page. There is a lot of good stuff submitted every day on HN. Improving the signal:noise ratio here means improving both sides of the ratio, by flagging bad submissions (submissions that violate the guidelines, including submissions of on-topic content from lousy sources) and upvoting good submissions.