Show HN: Monkeys.zip – 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters

Posted by yathern 4/3/2025

Show HN: Monkeys.zip – 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters(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.

145 points | 32 comments

netsharc 4/3/2025|

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...

yathern 4/3/2025||

Glad you like it! I was considering taking some form of payment for some cosmetics, but it just felt out of character for me.

E_Bfx 4/3/2025|||

That was my first thought : "Oh NFT is still a thing in 2025". But no, it is really awesome.

blatantly 4/3/2025||

And then someone would pay their drug supplier 60M for a monkey NFT

mechagodzilla 4/3/2025||

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.

voussoir 4/4/2025||

This is beautiful man, congratulations. I love how much personality there is in the animations!

yathern 4/4/2025|

Thanks you very much! I'm proud of the silly animations too, that was fun to learn

hombre_fatal 4/4/2025||

This has a weird amount of polish for what it is. I'm impressed.

I'd like to hear more about the impl.

yathern 4/4/2025|

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.

sen 4/4/2025||

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.

vekatimest 4/3/2025||

Is the plan to monetize this with paid 'gear' upgrades & 'claiming'? Feels a lot like an NFT project from 3 years ago.

yathern 4/3/2025|

Haha I don't think anyone would pay money for a monkey hat, and it would take away from the fun if they did

Waterluvian 4/3/2025||

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.

h1fra 4/4/2025||

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.

chewmieser 4/3/2025||

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!

yathern 4/3/2025|

> 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.

thomasfromcdnjs 4/4/2025||

Awesome.

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

yathern 4/4/2025|

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

BugsJustFindMe 4/3/2025|

Many of these look like apes, not monkeys.

yathern 4/3/2025|

I won't tell if you won't.

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