I use Hacker News Daily [0] to get daily top stories and Ask Hacker News Weekly [1] to get weekly top questions from Hacker News. I found this very useful because you can subscribe to the mailing list or add the RSS feed. So, you don't need to visit HN frequently (others have already told about this).
Another site I rare to visit is n-gate.com [2]. It gives you brief summary of the story. This site also has RSS that you can subscribe.
[0]: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/