/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.

feedbeater looks like it generates it fine-- e.g.

http://www.diffbot.com/api/rss/http://news.ycombinator.com/

Impressive. I wonder what their change-detection system is.

And, after leaving the Google feed running for a bit, it found 3 new articles in the past day, on /newest. Definitely fail-worthy.