Hacker Remix

Show HN: Monkeys.zip – 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters

126 points by yathern 1 day ago | 31 comments

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 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day ago

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

blatantly 1 day ago

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

voussoir 18 hours ago

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

yathern 18 hours ago

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

mechagodzilla 1 day 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 19 hours 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 19 hours 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.