Show HN: Monkeys.zip – 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters

(monkeys.zip)

112 points | by yathern 20 hours ago ago

30 comments

  • netsharc 17 hours ago ago

    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 16 hours ago ago

      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 16 hours ago ago

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

    • blatantly 17 hours ago ago

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

  • voussoir 9 hours ago ago

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

    • yathern 9 hours ago ago

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

  • mechagodzilla 17 hours ago ago

    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.

  • hombre_fatal 11 hours ago ago

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

    I'd like to hear more about the impl.

    • yathern 11 hours ago ago

      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.

  • vekatimest 15 hours ago ago

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

    • yathern 15 hours ago 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

      • Waterluvian 15 hours ago ago

        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.

  • Spacemolte 2 hours ago ago

    Cool, but it's not great seeing a swastika when zooming out..

    • yathern an hour ago ago

      Where? I don't see anything near the main clump

  • sen 8 hours ago ago

    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.

  • chewmieser 16 hours ago ago

    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 16 hours ago ago

      > 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.

  • lugvruzzle 13 hours ago ago

    Anyone else have trouble logging in/staying logged in. Logging in with email.

    • avadhesh18 2 hours ago ago

      verify the email and then refresh.

  • BugsJustFindMe 17 hours ago ago

    Many of these look like apes, not monkeys.

    • yathern 16 hours ago ago

      I won't tell if you won't.

  • thomasfromcdnjs 11 hours ago ago

    Awesome.

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

    • yathern 11 hours ago ago

      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

  • krzat 17 hours ago ago

    Awesome idea, I wonder how long it will take to write a coherent sentence.

  • yeah879846 15 hours ago ago

    Not nearly enough to write the works of shakespeare

  • ChrisArchitect 11 hours ago ago

    How can I search for which monkey has written the word blurst? /s

  • cdaringe 18 hours ago ago

    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.

    • MitziMoto 10 hours ago ago

      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.

    • yathern 18 hours ago ago

      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