Ask HN: How often do you read academic papers?

I don't read academic papers very often, but I have found myself reading them more frequently in the past few years. Mainly these papers are on topics I'm curious about and are sometimes also tangentially related to my work. The topics I'm mainly interested in right now are Databases, Distributed Systems, and Programming Languages.

How often do you read academic papers?

If you do read academic papers, what topics do you read about?