Instead of subscribing to

http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Subscribe to

http://rss.robbywalker.name/yc/rss?count=10

This gets you only posts that make it to the top 10, instead of the top 25, meaning fewer, higher quality posts hit your RSS reader.

The server also supports reading from Reddit, as in

http://rss.robbywalker.name/reddit/r/IAmA.rss

Source code

Full source code for this Tornado based server can be found at:

http://github.com/robbywalker/rss-shortener