Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app
bigwords.page195 points by SpeakingOfBrad 5 hours ago
195 points by SpeakingOfBrad 5 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.
We had similar ideas! Except mine is less customizable, I never thought to add formatting.
I love it!
In fact I employed the same idea for the slide stack site I use for teaching. Not exactly "URL is an app" but "URL is a slide"
https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/_1.html?sequence=...
The same consideration applies. No backend, no storage, also no user data collection, no authorization, no hurdles in general. Everyone can use it.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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Edit: here’s another LLMism example from another HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996255
I always get en and em confused. They are all just dashes to me :-).
The "Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules" is from the docs indicating that these things are not supported.
> I always get en and em confused
Yeah, it’s somewhat a typography-nerdy thing :–) (gosh that looks terrible probably; edit: actually it’s surprisingly fine)
> indicating that these things are not supported
Of course, but it does sound a bit unnatural IMO. Then again, I’m going by the vibes here.
OP didn't quote the part with the em dash, they quoted the part with the "The X is the Y", which is a common LLMism.
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
It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy. The app is the app, and it lives on the server. The URL just contains the content of the sign.
it's marketing speech, following the rules of how to make memorable slogans that have been around for decades and in many different formats. Elevator pitches, explain it to me like I'm five, keep it simple, stupid, and so forth. It sounds like an LLM because LLMs learned from the digested wisdom of a million marketers. It may be an LLM produced it or it may just as well be someone who has cracked a marketing textbook some time in their life or hell, has watched the full run of Mad Men and thought, now what is a pithy way to express the selling point of this thing?
on edit: That said, I would probably have said "Turn Any Screen Into A Sign with Just A URL!"
I’ve read it as “the URL is the UI”... sorry; I mean, you can change URL params (remotely) to control the app. It is a good idea perhaps (if you have the means to open a URL remotely), but evidently the title does not get the idea across. (Maybe I’m also wrong, I haven’t read the docs yet :)
I thought they meant the outputted javascript is embedded in the url, like a bookmarklet. But looking closer, it clearly isn't.
“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.
It must have been used by humans before LLMs, because where do you think they learned it?
All the marketing materials that got used for training. Marketing speak is not my cup of team.
It has been used before LLMs. I have no idea why LLMs prefer it, though.
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.
> 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.
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.
Indeed. I would much prefer to read someone's poor English over their fluent LLM.
Yeah, the issue here is that the URL is not the app.
This is basically a differently-shaped https://github.com/antonmedv/textarea
Cool idea, but agree that fixing actual mistakes in the title is a worthwhile use of time.
https://bigwords.page/#smol!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!...!
You seem to have the same bug I had when I first implemented https://screaming.saej.in/
In Firefox, scrollWidth includes spaces that extend into the margin, so it's possible for text to fit perfectly on the screen, but scrollWidth > clientWidth. Fix here https://saej.in/posts/screaming/
In the make one by hand section, you probably don't need to tell people %20 is a space. If they type it in naturally, the browser should encode automatically
Hook it up to voice control so I can put an iPad in the back window of the car and tell other drivers… things.
I had this idea ten years ago. Told my parents it’d be nice to say “have a good day” and my moms initial reaction was she’d say “** you”. End of that idea.
Ouch, life long child trauma created. No idea is good enough to impress mum.
I considered something similar with LED lights but I deemed it illegal in Germany
Completely different architecture, but would be amazing if another device could control what message (or photo, embedded video) is displayed.
There's a huge industry around digital signage and I've always felt it could be replaced with a simple Chromium kiosk + auto-refreshed webpage content. There's really no need for expensive HDMI connections or custom video streams when we already have browsers.
Damn, you triggered my old memories of clicking one of these on some old forum: https://disco.[EPILEPSY WARNING]fleo.se/hello
"Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules."
Claudish needs to be cleaned up.
I love solutions like this. Make the URL the entirety of the data needed. Awesome
Cool project. But why not built with php so I can simply throw it on my running web server?
I use a similar thing but designed to be as few steps as possible:
The URL is the state but clearly there is an actual app here
I used to order drinks like this when the bar was full
I use to try and coordinate game nights across the world, and a url with the Unix timestamp of the event and a countdown showing how many days and hours worked quite well.
Suggestion: make it a GoogleTV / AppleTV app so users can set it up in a few clicks and transform any screen laying around into a sign.
I built https://signagesync.app for my cafe. It can be used to create a video wall (combine multiple screens to make a bigger screen).
I think BIGWORDS.PAGE would be a great companion to a web browser app on those TV devices. I haven't found any good web browser for AppleTV, but if somebody has a browser/kiosk app that let's you send a URL from your phone, that would be really great!
Unfortunately Apple TV doesn't support WebView. I'm procuring a second-hand device so I can test my app there. I'm thinking of rendering it on the server and sending a series of images. Not sure of the cost, though.
I like this site because it exemplifies DOTADIW, do one thing and do it well.
Brilliant
I like that the fragment is basically argv for a static web app.
how to hide or change the gigantic preview when sharing on apple messages? id prefer to change it, the default is obtrusive
IIRC with any link thru Messages, before sending, you can press and hold it and it'll give u the option to send just as a text link
Love this and I already have a use for this
how to hide the Preview when sharing on messages? id prefer something more neutral.
That's the OG (Open Graph) Image. It's an image built into the site that's used as the thumbnail for shares on social media and messaging apps. (More info on OG Images here: https://layerre.com/glossary/open-graph-image/)
How could I change the image to be less intrusive? I can't have it show an image of the message you're trying to share, because the server never sees that message. But can I make the default image nicer on the eyes.
This is a new project and a great place to start.
So many fun rabbit holes from here with the different ways to get this working (and keeping displaying) on a chromecast, etc.
Nice work! This is great.
Really clever! Definitely feels like positive hacker creativity. Thanks for making it open source.
this is actually awesome, i've had something similar on my todo list forever. thanks!!! https://bigwords.page/#%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F
Site is blocked - getting an SSL warning on Firefox.
Really well done, can think of a few times this would have been useful in the recent past. Would be great for conferences in particular!
Love this. Simple idea. Nice execution.
I've used something like this on a phone to tell another car something was wrong with their vehicle.
> The URL is the app
We used to call them websites
