>>1001blogs rss feeds. most languages have planets, which combine multiple rss feeds into one. those are typically very useful to follow along with a bunch of domain experts. e.g.
http://planet.lisp.org/ or
http://www.planeterlang.com/. also you can find individual developers, like project leads, or just people that seem smart, and follow their blogs.
i avoid hackernews too, but i have a little script that downloads headers once every couple of hours, runs some simple metric on them (like comment count and how long stayed on front page) and then gives me a large html page once a week. i then spend maximum one hour a week going over those links. obviously no comments. once you sever the drip feed, it becomes much easier to very impartially look at the list, and ignore about 99% of it
