Bill Gates' AMA

http://www.topiama.com ? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4148415)

I hope that reddit comes up with a better interface for doing AMAs, too. I think that the interface for the interviewee is just what I see as the observer. Hitting re-fresh over and over again.

It'd be nice to see a real-time client of popular questions and chances for rebuttals. There'd only be one client in this case, everyone else would see what we do now.

Hopefully, this would make it easier for interviewees to answer more questions in an hour rather than the dozen or so I see now.

Someone asked him what stuff he likes which is cheap/free. His answer was kids, cheeseburgers and open courseware.

Someone asked him where he got the kids from, to which he answered the stork.

If you are not familiar, the stork is a common answer given to children when they ask where babies come from without telling them about sex. The children are told that babies are delivered by a stork, something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJfMv5oYa9k

There is a subreddit for that - http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/

I did it manually. It would be easy to automate though, it was fairly methodical - Go through his posts in the AMA's timeframe, click through the Context link for each one and copy the immediate parent, make the whole parent a link to the same Context, copy his reply underneath. Put spacers between each Q/A and italicize the questions. Beyond that I just cleaned up a few tiny mistakes, linkified some raw URLs, and switched around just one of the questions from the chronological order (bet you can't guess which one).

> What do people give you for your birthday, given that you can buy anything you want?

thisisbillgates:

> Free software. Just kidding.

> Books actually.