It doesn't necessarily start out as a waste of time but it can become one if you spend too much time on it. I try to restrict myself to reading YC when recompiling stuff on my powerbook. At the beginning of the build I use

  open -a Opera http://news.ycombinator.com

and at the end I have

  open -a Opera make.out

That way the browser automatically takes me to the build output when it's time to get back to coding.