Yeah, it definitely is EcmaScript 6. They've added the "class" and "constructor" keywords. Typescript is very mush modeled after EcmaScript 6 anyways, so technically it can be both. But I'm sure it's EcmaScript6, because that's what Angular 2 is written in.
I agree. There is virtually no way you can smoothly upgrade an Angular 1 project to this. You'd have to redo most of it from scratch. There are a lot of huge projects that are built on Angular 1 -- many enterprise products too. And this is a huge blow to maintenance. It might be a reason for a lot of people dropping Angular and going for something that makes more business sense. Maybe it's React's time to shine.
It's an acqui-hire; they want to build the most talented team so that they can develop the best smart-home devices. They're going head-to-head against Apple, but with a very different strategy. Apple is trying to build the best mobile devices and the best SDK to create a huge market and a great dev environment for developers to build devices for HomeKit. Google's strategy seems to be to build their own great smart home devices.
That's a viable reason. But I think they're mainly doing that because Tony Fadell is in charge of Google's whole smart home operation, so Nest has to remain the overarching brand.
This is a lot like what @paulg was talking about on his "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" essay when he talks about replacing email: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
Do you know of any experiment where machine learning was applied to building an algorithm that learned anaphora resolution based on a human generated training set. I'd love to read any articles/papers you have on this. Thanks!
I don't think Quora opened up too broadly too soon. And even if that were the case, the upvote mechanism helps clear out the junk. Also, I don't feel that it grew cold, because I still see all of the influencers I look up to answer questions all the time.