I found that I often shy away from posts on Hacker News or sites like ScienceMagazine because I don’t understand every second word on the page.
A simple dictionary extension doesn’t really help in these situations, because I’m not looking for the literal meaning of a word.
Like one time I was reading a post about Rust compilers and the dictionary extension just failed hilariously.. “Rust” (the programming language, you fool!! not the thing that forms on iron when it oxidises -__-).
What I actually need in these moments is context-aware explanations of concepts, not dictionary definitions. AI turns out to be pretty good at that.
So I built a very simple tool for this — under ~300 lines of code — that has ended up saving me a ton of time.
It works pretty simply:
it takes the highlighted text, parses the HTML of the page for surrounding context, and sends both the page content + selection to an LLM provider of your choice (OpenAI, Gemini, or Claude). You can also reorder which provider you prefer.
That’s basically it. I don't collect any data or anything.
Here’s the GitHub link: https://github.com/oishika10/rhino
I’m pretty sure this can be improved a lot, so I’d really appreciate feedback or ideas. This is the first project I’m sharing publicly like this.
I enjoyed building this because made me realize how small, simple tools can still be surprisingly powerful and save me a ton of time in life.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776069
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