Yql-combinator is a project mainly written in JavaScript, it's free.
A YQL JSONP grabber for YCombinator
This a simple OO JS file to allow polling of YCombinator with YQL, though it could be easily adapted to polling any YQL statement/ Google news page for links (I think it's the same XPath?).
Either way, I only wrote this README to make Github happy, so read the code if you want to understand what it does or go to
http://danbeam.org/yqlcombinator