Show HN: Browser Extension to make a language test out of any website I was preparing to German C1 recently and my vocabulary was the bottleneck. I didn't want to read boring materials and do boring exercises. Instead I noticed that there are sites in German, which I naturally enjoy. So I just made an extension to make language tests out of them. The approach is the following: 1) Open an interesting webpage in your target language. 2) Select text. 3) The extension replaces some words with gaps. 4) Read the text, fill in the gaps. Obviously just typing random words out of the blue can be overwhelming, so there is a mode to drag&drop words from a list into the correct places. I personally see this as active reading. My brain not only consumes information, but always try to guess the word from the context. I suspect that this helps with active vocabulary (i.e. to actually use the new words in writing). In the end I passed C1 exam (obviously I did other preparations too, not only this extension). This is a beta version for now and it is 100% free: Chrome: https://ift.tt/3swC3SN Firefox: https://ift.tt/2ZMgXDh If you didn't enjoy my explanation skills, there is an example video here: https://ift.tt/2OYXUUk I would love to hear whether you find this useful and your ideas how I could improve it. I might add payed features eventually to help developing the extension further, but I don't know a good mechanism to do this. I understand that 1$ in the US is very different from 1$ in e.g. India. I want this extension to bring value to everyone independently of their location and financial state. My current plan is to have the base version (i.e. like now) always free, since this already provides majority of value. Curious to hear your thoughts. February 25, 2021 at 02:41PM
Show HN: Launch VM workloads securely and instantaneously, without VMs Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack channel. Thanks! April 29, 2021 at 07:50AM
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