Show HN: Monkeys.zip – 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters
118 points
1 day ago
| 16 comments
| monkeys.zip
| HN
Hey HN! I posted this on April 1st when it launched, and though it didn't get traction here, it was a minor hit on reddit! Now that we've got a few thousand monkeys under our belt, wanted to give it another shot here!

Happy to talk about the technical details of running the site - using supabase/postgres and constantly putting out fires from the traffic.

netsharc
21 hours ago
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Funny that one can login and claim a monkey, and customize its working environment. In an alternate universe where a version of you wants to make a buck, they'd sell "monkeycoins" that users can earn to get customizations for their monkey (like the fancy couch or a Macbook).

Did I say earn? I mean buy...

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yathern
20 hours ago
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Glad you like it! I was considering taking some form of payment for some cosmetics, but it just felt out of character for me.
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E_Bfx
20 hours ago
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That was my first thought : "Oh NFT is still a thing in 2025". But no, it is really awesome.
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blatantly
21 hours ago
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And then someone would pay their drug supplier 60M for a monkey NFT
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voussoir
13 hours ago
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This is beautiful man, congratulations. I love how much personality there is in the animations!
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yathern
13 hours ago
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Thanks you very much! I'm proud of the silly animations too, that was fun to learn
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mechagodzilla
20 hours ago
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Ha! When I was first learning to program in high school, I wrote a 'distributed monkeys-on-typewriters' simulator. I somehow acquired a stack of surplus Pentium 100s that I had running in an unused closet at the school, communicating with each other over IPX. I remember the server had a fun 'Guess-operations-per-second' (GOPS) realtime display.
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h1fra
3 hours ago
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Impressive. Few problems, after sign-in could not get a monkey until hard refresh, big monkey is flickering like crazy on chrome M3 14", https://monkeys.zip/profile is not working when accessed directly.
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hombre_fatal
15 hours ago
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This has a weird amount of polish for what it is. I'm impressed.

I'd like to hear more about the impl.

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yathern
15 hours ago
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Absolutely, going to do a write up once some of the dust settles. The implementation is not perfect for sure, but I learned a whole lot doing it.
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sen
12 hours ago
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This is adorably cute, and deceptively fun to follow along with. I particularly like that it shows which monkey discovered a word first, making you want to visit back and see if your monkey found any new words.

One thing I'd like to see is a way to go back from the "Word view" (after you clicked to see details about a specific word) back to your monkey view with the list of words.

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vekatimest
19 hours ago
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Is the plan to monetize this with paid 'gear' upgrades & 'claiming'? Feels a lot like an NFT project from 3 years ago.
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yathern
19 hours ago
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Haha I don't think anyone would pay money for a monkey hat, and it would take away from the fun if they did
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Waterluvian
19 hours ago
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Some people would. But that doesn’t mean we should exploit them. I really admire what you’ve made and I think any attempt to cash in would sour and diminish your accomplishment.

Not that art shouldn’t be salable. But not all art is appropriate for monetization.

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Spacemolte
6 hours ago
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Cool, but it's not great seeing a swastika when zooming out..
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yathern
5 hours ago
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Where? I don't see anything near the main clump
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chewmieser
20 hours ago
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That’s fun!

Couple of things I would suggest:

Maybe get rid of 1-2 character words in the word counter? Seems easy for it to hit things like i or ie etc. I would love to see a counter that ignores those at least

Also the report card section on the Shakespeare progress panel wasn’t scrollable on iOS.

Neat either way!

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yathern
20 hours ago
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> Maybe get rid of 1-2 character words in the word counter? Seems easy for it to hit things like i or ie etc. I would love to see a counter that ignores those at least

I'm considering that as well, if only to calm my database down a bit

> Also the report card section on the Shakespeare progress panel wasn’t scrollable on iOS.

Second time I've heard that! I have no iOS devices so I can't fix it too easily, but I'll take another look.

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BugsJustFindMe
21 hours ago
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Many of these look like apes, not monkeys.
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yathern
20 hours ago
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I won't tell if you won't.
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lugvruzzle
17 hours ago
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Anyone else have trouble logging in/staying logged in. Logging in with email.
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avadhesh18
6 hours ago
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verify the email and then refresh.
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thomasfromcdnjs
15 hours ago
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Awesome.

Can you do a write up on that beautiful rendering? my lord.

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yathern
15 hours ago
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I've spent the last few weeks working on the backend, I completely forgot how much work I put into making it able to render enough unique monkeys. Mostly a custom implementation built around THREE.js InstancedMesh to add animations, and support egonomically instancing lots of small types of objects
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krzat
21 hours ago
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Awesome idea, I wonder how long it will take to write a coherent sentence.
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yeah879846
19 hours ago
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Not nearly enough to write the works of shakespeare
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ChrisArchitect
15 hours ago
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How can I search for which monkey has written the word blurst? /s
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cdaringe
22 hours ago
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Looks interesting, but after two (<30s) attempts I gave up trying to figure out what it even is . There’s no about page, there’s some stats that I don’t know the significance of, there’s a blog that talks about improvements… But there’s just no straightforward description of what the heck I’m even looking at besides some fun monkey animations.
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MitziMoto
14 hours ago
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For goodness sake, this is what makes it great!

This reminds me so much of the "old" internet where people would just make fun things for the hell of it.

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yathern
22 hours ago
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Thanks for the feedback! I kinda take it for granted that people are aware of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, but maybe it's not as popular as I imagined! This is basically an art/community experiment project built around it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

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netsharc
21 hours ago
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Grandparent commenter is one of today's lucky 10000 https://xkcd.com/1053/
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