that's almost how I also do it, but reading the question above, I've tried to work out a solution and set a Hacker news subcategory here: http://bit.ly/4WxNeI on mcsquare.me (category: Technology, subcategory: Hackers), you can not just check hacker news titles, but also Paul Graham's blog and the Y combinator posterous Blog, and track back old stories very fast.
The bad part of this is just that, external links won't bring you to hacker news, but the original post, for Ask HN, it works very well, I've tried to figure out how to find the rss-link for new items and for the discussion tread (or comment), couldn't figure it out, I suspect there's no such a thing (Admin ?), so if one of you find out how to get it, thanks for sharing, or the admin may try to put those datas on a feed. Hope this can help some folk here, and if they are additional Y combinator feed I'm missing and you may want to see there, let me know.