The whole reason I end up commenting on HN, just like I am doing right now, is because I'm drifting from my intended research path and start thinking that maybe

The whole reason I end up commenting on HN, just like I am doing right now, is because I'm drifting from my intended research path and start thinking that maybe someone has posted some interesting story related to what I'm supposed to be looking at. Most recently, my intent to look into writing a compiler frontend for LLVM led me to install a dozen new modes in emacs, explore OCaml and Go, download the source code for several major projects with the intent of examining their garbage collection strategies and roughly 60 new papers in my "To Read" folder. :(