[HN Gopher] Show HN: Monkeys.zip - 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Monkeys.zip - 3000 Monkeys on Typewriters
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.
Author : yathern
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-04-03 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (monkeys.zip)
(TXT) w3m dump (monkeys.zip)
| cdaringe wrote:
| 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.
| yathern wrote:
| 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
| netsharc wrote:
| Grandparent commenter is one of today's lucky 10000
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| netsharc wrote:
| 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...
| blatantly wrote:
| And then someone would pay their drug supplier 60M for a monkey
| NFT
| E_Bfx wrote:
| That was my first thought : "Oh NFT is still a thing in 2025".
| But no, it is really awesome.
| yathern wrote:
| Glad you like it! I was considering taking some form of payment
| for some cosmetics, but it just felt out of character for me.
| krzat wrote:
| Awesome idea, I wonder how long it will take to write a coherent
| sentence.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Many of these look like apes, not monkeys.
| yathern wrote:
| I won't tell if you won't.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| 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.
| chewmieser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| vekatimest wrote:
| Is the plan to monetize this with paid monkey upgrades &
| 'claiming'?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-03 23:01 UTC)