Show HN: Monkeys.zip – 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters
1 day ago (monkeys.zip)
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.
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...
Glad you like it! I was considering taking some form of payment for some cosmetics, but it just felt out of character for me.
That was my first thought : "Oh NFT is still a thing in 2025". But no, it is really awesome.
And then someone would pay their drug supplier 60M for a monkey NFT
This is beautiful man, congratulations. I love how much personality there is in the animations!
Thanks you very much! I'm proud of the silly animations too, that was fun to learn
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.
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.
This has a weird amount of polish for what it is. I'm impressed.
I'd like to hear more about the impl.
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.
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.
Is the plan to monetize this with paid 'gear' upgrades & 'claiming'? Feels a lot like an NFT project from 3 years ago.
Haha I don't think anyone would pay money for a monkey hat, and it would take away from the fun if they did
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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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!
> 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.
Awesome.
Can you do a write up on that beautiful rendering? my lord.
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
Many of these look like apes, not monkeys.
I won't tell if you won't.
Anyone else have trouble logging in/staying logged in. Logging in with email.
verify the email and then refresh.
Cool, but it's not great seeing a swastika when zooming out..
Where? I don't see anything near the main clump
Awesome idea, I wonder how long it will take to write a coherent sentence.
Not nearly enough to write the works of shakespeare
How can I search for which monkey has written the word blurst? /s
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.
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.
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
Grandparent commenter is one of today's lucky 10000 https://xkcd.com/1053/