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Comment by SpeakingOfBrad

7 hours ago

I had the idea for BIGWORDS.PAGE when I wanted to display a message on a tablet that I had remote management control over, but no physical access. Configuring it to be a kiosk browser is easy, but how do I get the browser to show my message? So I made the URL be the message.

It uses a URL fragment to configure the message. Browsers don't send URL fragments to the server, so I never see your message. There's no backend, and no storage.

All parameters are documented, so generating a message link is easy. There's also a built-in editor to make it extra easy.

https://bigwords.page/#Hello,%20HN!&bg=ff6600&fg=000000&font...

There are a few extra features like slides, animations, and countdowns and timers. QR codes too. Not too fancy, but hopefully enough to be useful.

I know the uses for this are pretty niche. But it may be one of those things that you keep as a nugget in your brain, a tool in your back pocket. Not something you use often, but when you do it makes things just a little bit easier.

It's open source (MIT), and self-hostable if that's your thing.

Let me know what you think.

38 comments

SpeakingOfBrad

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zie  30 minutes ago

This is neat. I'm deaf, so I have to write people all the time with big text. I have a mobile app that does this, but it's neat you have something web based. Thanks for this. I'm going to self-host it as I can see a lot of use and I don't want to spam your servers.

Thanks!

  • SpeakingOfBrad  20 minutes ago

    The hosted version runs through Cloudflare, and since it’s a static site it caches really well! Don’t ever feel bad about using the hosted version. I’m not worried about bandwidth there. (But self-hosting is fun too!)

notpushkin  5 hours ago

> The URL is the app

LLM-speak is a huge turn off to me (and a lot of other people here, from my interactions), so the fact that your submission title is AI-generated is... sorry, I have no words. I don’t even care that much about the code, but please write prose by hand, in your own voice, if you want us to read it.

Edit: rephrased the last sentence. Also, here’s my take on the title:

> Show HN: Bigwords.page – turn any screen into a sign, controlled by the URL params

  • rendleflag  4 hours ago

    Let me guess, you saw the `–` and thought "Clearly no human uses the em dash. It must all be AI".

    I looked over the website and their github page and saw no indication of AI usage. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out.

    • notpushkin  4 hours ago

      That’s an en-dash – and I use those myself. (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)

      It’s all by the vibes, I don’t have any concrete proof. FWIW, the comment seems at least hand-edited, so maybe it’s just this “the [A] is the [B]” trope that has triggered me. If the rest of it is readable, then I apologize, but still: that’s a bad title, please don’t use this – unless you’re writing a LinkedIn post.

      ---

      Edit: here’s another LLMism example from another HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996255

      4 replies →

    • GrinningFool  3 hours ago

      For me (not the OP) I see the patterns 'The X is the Y', 'Every X is a Y' (both of which are there) and llm-sense tingles. Add in Not A, B, C or Z and I'm increasingly convinced it's LLM generated text.

  • dylanhouli  4 hours ago

    Wait how is "The URL is the app" LLM-speak? Genuine question, sounded fine to me when I read it, not sure what a better way to phrase it would be

    • notpushkin  4 hours ago

      “The [A] is the [B]” (and variations with “the” replaced with “your”) is screaming LLM to me. It’s been used by real people too, but it sounds very corporate, and is not something I’ve seen used to describe a personal project before LLMs.

      6 replies →

  • okaleniuk  4 hours ago

    Donald Knuth once said "Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets."

    Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.

    • bmacho  4 hours ago

      > If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good

      It does not, it does the opposite. It gets the programmer ignored.

      Comments like "don't say this, this is LLM-ism" are the things that help the programmer get heard, whether she isn't good at English or she was just lazy and used LLM to generate text.

    • notpushkin  4 hours ago

      I haven’t studied to write prose either. I have studied English since when I was a kid, but I still make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay.

      LLMs turn your own voice into uniform corpo-speak. It is usually not an improvement, and it certainly doesn’t help you get heard – you’ll blend in with hundreds of other projects with the same-looking landing page, same tone of voice, same kilometres of docs that nobody read before putting up, and you’re basically playing a game of chance here. It’s like TikTok for programmers.

      Ten times out of ten, I’ll prefer broken English over Claudish. Speak in your own voice. Don’t be afraid.

      1 reply →

    • ShinyLeftPad  1 hour ago

      it doesn't help programmers be heard, it helps LLMs be heard. Just publish the thing with your own words, what matters is if they are genuine, not that they sound exactly like everybody else.