Why not have an RSS feed of, say, the top 50 stories. I know that they're constantly moving in and out, but it should be doable. You're all hackers after all ;)
It would probably be a good idea for the main page to allow for auto detecting the feed so it shows the little RSS icon in the location bar.<p>I think something like this is all you need in <head><p><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Hacker News" href="<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/rss" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/rss</a>"/><p>
What I really want is a link in the feed to the item on news.yc itself -- not just the source link. Part of the value is the discussion and having to find it again on news.yc is a pain.
yes, it already existed, but most people won't know that unless they see the orange button in their browser's toolbar indicating that the feed was autodetected.