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...

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

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.

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

I'd like to hear more about the impl.

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 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.

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!

Awesome.

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

Many of these look like apes, not monkeys.

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

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

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

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.