Hmmm, I've been working on something like this for a little while now. I guess I'll get to find out what it's like to compete with Google at something.
(I deleted the ragecomment I left immediately after reading this earlier, sorry)
That's clearly my first thought on every idea now: is google likely to implement that themselves at some point ? (it doesn't block me from trying though)
/newest does a bit better, though it gets excited about changes in rating. And articles still aren't linked, though they're at least shown when they're new.
news.ycombinator's root page is a very un-feed-like page, I wouldn't expect any service to handle it correctly.
Cool stuff. I have been using Sucuri's Network Integrity monitor for the same thing... I monitor my own sites and some pages that I am interested to be notified when they change.
That can be very useful as an intrusion detection system if your pages are modified without you knowing it.
This feature reminds me of diffbot (diffbot.com). I met one of the co-founders (who's out of Stanford) and his demo worked very well. He was using it to check updates on course webpages, for example, so this feature isn't new. It also has some neat uses cases for financial companies tracking lots small snippets of new info.
Good, now if google would only take this idea and apply it to their search. I want full text search on page contents not on the epic tag cloud or other random junk in the sidebar.
(I deleted the ragecomment I left immediately after reading this earlier, sorry)