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.
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 is beautiful man, congratulations. I love how much personality there is in the animations!
This has a weird amount of polish for what it is. I'm impressed.
I'd like to hear more about the impl.
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.
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.
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.
Not nearly enough to write the works of shakespeare
Cool, but it's not great seeing a swastika when zooming out..
Funny
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.
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...