Filtering the stories by quality or popularity?

It would be very helpful to have some ranking or human-selected list of the better stories. I know a very few get space on the homepage (and some get published of course), but there are an awful lot of good stories that just get lost in the chronological string.

If people don't have a lot of time, but would like to see the recent best or most popular submissions, there's currently no way to do that.