About Nate Murray

Nate Murray is a programmer, musician, and beekeeper. I work as a Senior Research Engineer at AT&T Interactive and I have been working with terabyte-scale data since 2009. My work involves large-scale data mining with MapReduce, distributed computing, iOS apps, and a few web apps.

Some of my recent projects include:

• Building a web crawler from the ground up for AT&T Interactive that is capable of fetching 1 million pages per hour from a single machine. The fetcher was written in Clojure and the crawl planning was calculated in Hadoop MapReduce.
• BeeSaving.com, a site committed to saving bees from Colony Collapse Disorder, in part, by connecting Beekeepers with geographically relevant swarms.
• iPad Game for Cats a top 100-iPad entertainment app, featured in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and more.

I have a wide variety of open-source projects which you can view on github. Here’s a handful:

• cascading-simhash: simple simhashing in Hadoop with Cascading
• Smoker: A library for writing Hive UDFs in Clojure
• Similarity: Document similarity in large collections with MapReduce in Scala
• Chordjerl: An Erlang implementation of the CHORD distributed hash lookup protocol
• Interval: A Ruby library that calculates musical note pitch and interval arithmetic
• gen_cluster: An Erlang behavior for distributed node clustering
• Stoplight: Fully distributed mutex server in Erlang (based on the SIGMA algorithm)
• Backupgem: An end-to-end rotational backup and archive tool written in Ruby
• Shapes Panels: An Objective-C iPhone library for creating interactive pages of panels (used in our iPhone game Jacob’s Shapes)
• BoyeRMoore: Boyer-Moore string search algorithm in Ruby (supports tokens and regexps)

Follow Nate on twitter or send him an email at nate@xcombinator.com.

What are the origins of name ‘X-Combinator’?

We started this blog in 2007. Around that time, I was reading a lot of functional programming books and encountered the fixed point combinator known as the Y Combinator. The domain ycombinator.com was taken by a “small venture capital firm”, so we picked xcombinator.com instead. (We were only peripherally aware of Y Combinator in ‘07. Little did we know that it would become as successful and well-known as it is today. Needless to say, we’re not associated with Y Combinator in any way.)