Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm?

Big cultural changes happen slowly, then all at once. This summer, the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer, was identified through the search of a third-party consumer genomics service called GEDmatch, which turned up one of his distant relatives. The hit was no fluke: Science reports that the commercialization of genomics has grown so much that around 60 percent of Americans with European heritage could be linked to a relative through the databases of companies like 23andMe. On Monday this trend entered the political sphere, with Senator Elizabeth Warren announcing, in refutation of President Donald Trump’s skepticism, that her DNA shows “strong evidence” of Native American ancestry some six to ten generations ago.

These different but related news items tell the story of DNA science’s trajectory from the academic peer-reviewed realm, to the hands of law enforcement, to the broader culture of at-home genetic testing. For years, DNA has largely been considered part of an invisible, mysterious realm that experts can dip into as needed: to identify criminals, to screen for disease. But that paradigm is giving way to a new one. Now that so much of our genetic information is stored in databases, linking us all to each other, it turns out that DNA technology is not a neutral arbiter of truth. Rather, it exerts its own influence and can be used to enhance the power imbalances that exist in this country.

Since the first American was convicted using DNA evidence—Tommie Lee Andrews, for rape, in Florida, 1987—nearly 400,000 cases have concluded the same way, according to the FBI. Sixteen million Americans have their DNA stored in a law enforcement database. Meanwhile, 15 million people around the world have had their DNA analyzed by a direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetics company like MyHeritage or 23andMe. The way law enforcement authorities and 23andMe process DNA is different (the police only do routine tests, enough to match two samples, while DTC companies use a process called genotyping to define which genetic variants a person possesses). But these two worlds are starting to merge. In 2015, a 23andMe transparency report revealed that law enforcement agencies had requested access to the company’s genetic database, but had been denied. And with the capture of the Golden State Killer, the overlap between law enforcement’s priorities and the “fun” commercial aspect of genetic testing has become clear.

This is cause for concern not just because it represents a potentially vast infringement of privacy; it also could reinforce existing biases within the law enforcement system, whose use of genetic data is skewed. A 2011 study in PLOS Medicine showed that “[f]orensic DNA databases are growing to mirror racial disparities in arrest practices and incarceration rates.” As prison populations have grown, they have been accompanied by a “dramatic shift” in their racial proportions, as African Americans and Latinos have been disproportionately targeted by drug-focused policing. So, the authors observed, it follows that law enforcements’ DNA databases mirror those unequal incarceration rates.

Now that police can use open-access genetic databases, they could potentially introduce racial bias to information that originated with unwitting consumers. A person can upload their results to a third-party service like GEDmatch, where it can lead police to their relatives. These are public concerns, and the answers are clouded by the sheer vastness of the numbers and the secrecy around law enforcement’s process for sifting through them.

Then there are the ethical problems already at play in the DTC companies’ work. This July, 23andMe sold its consumers’ data for $300 million to GlaxoSmithKline, for the purposes of medical research. On the scientific level, this makes sense: You need a huge corpus in order to study genes across the population. But for many, the case recalled the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose own DNA was used in research without her consent. In 1951 her tissue was removed without her knowledge, and used to create an extremely profitable medical industry. She died, and her husband and five children were left in poverty, never seeing any of the benefits that Lacks’s cells brought to others.

The other important connection between race and the DTC DNA testing kits is more subtle and psychological. There are many African American users who test themselves to connect to their history. 23andMe has encouraged them to do so, via their “African American Sequencing Project.” Slavery and imperialism has severed countless African Americans from their deeper origins, and there has been a therapeutic benefit to many from the material proof of their family’s existence. In 2016 Cara Rose DeFabio wrote an insightful piece about black 23andMe users confronted by painful truths lying hidden in their own genes.

The irony of black users’ data being used for medical research, then, is painful. That breaches in security have led to their genetic data becoming accessible to police via third-party services is more painful still.

The intersection between race and medical technology, especially genomics, lies behind the scandal of Elizabeth Warren’s own genetic disclosure. In asserting that she has Native American “blood,” she implies—although she explicitly claims otherwise in the promotional video—that Native identity has anything to do with DNA. In fact, it doesn’t. Tribes are free to determine membership as they choose, but none uses DNA testing as a membership standard. As Professor Kim TallBear of IndigenousSTS put it in a statement released on Twitter, Warren “focuses on and actually privileges DNA company definitions in this debate, which are ultimately settler-colonial definitions of who is Indigenous.” In other words, Warren “proving” that she is Native with her DNA undermines the real practices of Indigenous people and imposes an oppressive standard upon them.

Warren has effectively bought into a definition of Indigenousness that Trump established when he challenged her to prove her Native identity. Ironically, she has reinforced a medical model of ethnic “purity” reminiscent of eugenics. Many people have lamented the way that the Warren debacle has plunged our discourse on race back into the laboratory.

we really needed race science to return. there’s about to be craniometers at target.

In the medieval and early modern periods in Europe, explanations for the difference between people’s skin color tended to rely on either the Bible or simplistic environmental theories, like the idea that the sun burns people black. But in the 19th century European thinkers turned their attention to new models of race taxonomy. Scientists in the burgeoning field of anthropology measured skulls, weighed brains, and performed other kinds of physical measurements to “study” nonwhite people. These practices were always implicitly colonialist, because they posited whiteness as a norm, and became explicitly so in the colonial context. And of course “scientific racism” of this kind would be appropriated by the Nazis in the 20th century (even though many Victorian thinkers believed Jewish people to be superior), which is symptomatic of the extreme political pliability of the “medical” model of differentiating race.

This is where the early history of “race science” loops back around to our present moment. Trump has shot back at Warren, saying that he will only trust a DNA test that he personally administers. Just as in the colonial era, every test can be ruled as definitive or bunkum by whoever has the most power. There turns out to be no single “truth” about the information in Warren’s genome: just a process of deferral to the person who can speak the loudest.

Genomic science has saved countless lives, and given us miraculous insight into matters of the human body. But there is no neutral knowledge; it always has to exist in a flawed world. Now that genomics has become ubiquitous, it has taken on a very powerful politics. It has already become the territory of commerce; of law enforcement; of electioneering; of the biggest, oldest problems around race and identity in the United States. So much information on so many people is now stored in databases that we have reached a tipping point: Do we have control over DNA data, or does it have control over us? Our world is increasingly ruled by those who control such information. Our bodies are our own, but the data is not.

“To pardon or overturn the verdict against Asia Bibi, self-confessed blasphemer is the commission of blasphemy itself and is crime against Islam and the Constitution of Pakistan.” So read a handout distributed by the hardline Islamist group Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan in rallies all over Pakistan last week. The group threatened to paralyze the country with protests if the mother of five were to be exonerated by Pakistan’s Supreme Court, members of the group dispatching to all the major areas of the country.

Going by the laws of evidence and due process, Asia Bibi should be freed rather than put to death as ordered in 2010. Stemming from a dispute over a drinking cup, the case has huge evidentiary holes, violations of due process and factual fabrications. And as it has proceeded to the supreme court in Pakistan, it has become an emblem of how longstanding hatreds and vague laws have enabled minority persecution.

The story began in the small village of Katanwala, in an area known as Nankana Sahib, which stands 30 miles from the Pakistani city of Lahore. There, on the afternoon of June 14, 2009, four women working in the fields got into a terrible argument over a drinking cup. Asia Bibi, the only Christian among them, allegedly grabbed the communal cup and drank from it before the other three could do so. The others claimed she had “contaminated” the cup and that they should have been permitted to drink first. The argument escalated and more fieldworkers gathered. In an interview to BBC Newshour, Bibi’s daughter recounted how she ran to get her father. When they returned, however, Bibi had already been taken away. Within days a blasphemy case had been registered against her by the village cleric, who additionally claimed she had “confessed” to the crime.

The question of drinking order is a vestige of the Hindu caste system that has lingered in the area even after most of the population converted to Islam over a hundred years ago. Christians, believed to be converts from the lowest classes of Hinduism, continue to be treated as untouchables in parts of Pakistan. For high caste Hindus, using the same utensils as someone from a lower caste represented contamination or impurity. It seems  the women in the field with Asia Bibi on that ill-fated June day believed this as well.

The case seemed tailor-made for hardline parties looking to mobilize communities against religious minorities. Similar recent blasphemy cases have been brought against Shia Muslims and members of the Ahmediyya sects. The country is rapidly transitioning from a mostly rural to mostly urban milieu. With caste and status in flux, clinging to some imagined superiority based on religion can be an attractive prospect—even if it only confers the privilege of drinking from a cup before a Christian.

The blasphemy law itself has been criticized even by Islamic scholars, who have pointed to its vaguely worded text. But the law has become the signature issue of hardline groups who oppose any change they see as weakening the Islamic nature of the Pakistani state. Tehreek-e-Labbaik have deployed themselves as watchdogs and vigilantes, supposedly policing the country against blasphemers. In another incident several months ago, they staged a protracted sit-in at one of the major intersections in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital city, paralyzing traffic for months, because the government had surreptitiously removed the name of the Prophet Muhammad in the oath of office. The government capitulated, saying that the altered oath had been a “mistake.”

The new government installed after the election this summer has also shown susceptibility to hardline Islamic pressure. A little over a month ago, Prime Minister Imran Khan removed Princeton economist Atif Mian from his Economic Advisory Council because the latter belongs to the Ahamdiyya sect, which does not believe that the chain of prophets ended with Muhammad. Mian’s expertise in the area of debt and credit restructuring is sorely needed as Pakistan lobbies for an IMF bailout. But Khan, who already expressed his support for the blasphemy law as he wooed Islamists during his election campaign, removed Mian from his position.

With a public that has increasingly championed the death penalty and cheered its resumption following a seven-year moratorium that ended in 2015, and a Prime Minister beholden to the very people who want her dead, Asia Bibi can only rely on the Supreme Court itself. The lawyers and judges have all faced intimidation from the hardliners who are issuing threats, insisting that those who exonerate Asia Bibi will be blasphemers themselves. The three male justices deciding her case heard arguments from both sides on October 8, and while they seemed interested in the way the witness statements contradicted each other, and that the male cleric who had filed the case was not actually present when the altercation took place, there were few clues as to which way the court leaned. At the end of the proceedings, the court said it would “reserve” the verdict. Pakistani media were told to refrain from discussing the case, a directive most of have adhered to in recent days.

Aside from the threat of protests, a more sinister shadow hangs over the proceedings. Two politicians—the former Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, and a Federal Minister for Minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti—were gunned down in 2011 for supporting Asia Bibi’s innocence.

The Supreme Court has made bold rulings before, for example the one in 2017 that ended Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s time in office—he was subsequently convicted of corruption. And there is genuine concern in Pakistan about the international reaction to putting a woman to death over a dispute centered on a drinking cup.. 

Asia Bibi’s case may have begun as a macabre mélange of class, caste, and religious persecution, but it has quickly become a gendered narrative as well. Most if not all Tehreek-e-Labbaik members are men, as is Khadim Rizvi, its leader. Asia Bibi’s case would represent the first case ever of a woman put to ever be executed. The power now lies in the hands of the all male bench of the Supreme Court that heard her case, as the two male lawyers presented their arguments.

The country’s Supreme Court has shown it can stand up to politicians. Now is its chance to show it can stand up to the mob, and the deeply ingrained prejudices mobilizing it. At the heart of the case is, quite simply, a woman—and a large number of people who want her dead. 

In 2009, when Barack Obama traveled to Bristol, Virginia, for a town hall to promote the Affordable Care Act, his motorcade passed a small but turbulent protest. I was raised just outside this small Appalachian city, and even then, three years after graduating from high school, I knew it desperately needed health care reform. At the time, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute, almost a fifth of Bristol’s residents under age 65 had no health insurance—one of the highest rates in the state. And yet, when Obama arrived, people greeted him with signs that read SOCIALISM ISN’T COOL and OBAMA: “GOD” DECIDES LIFE AND DEATH NOT YOU OR NATIONAL HEALTHCARE.

Six months into his first term, Obama was facing this kind of opposition not just in Bristol, but nationwide, even in districts he’d won the previous fall. Alarmed by conservative talk radio hosts and the constant harping of an intransigent Republican Party, many Americans believed that the ACA would rip apart the fabric of American life. “No one should be surprised at the coming embrace of euthanasia,” conservative columnist Cal Thomas warned.

Despite the opposition, Democrats were promising that Obamacare would eventually boost their chances in elections, as Americans gradually came to see the benefits of the law: It made sure that preexisting conditions were no longer cause for discrimination, and gave people with diabetes, cancer, and other serious conditions a chance to afford health insurance. “As people learn about the bill, it’s going to be more and more popular,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in March 2010. “By November, those who voted for health care will find it an asset, those who voted against it will find it a liability.”

What Schumer predicted never happened, at least not that year. A few months later, the GOP picked up 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. A study published the following year estimated that at least 13 House Democrats lost their seats because of their support for the law. With the Tea Party sweeping into office, the ACA threatened to drag Democrats down.

This year, the prevailing attitude toward the ACA has changed. In West Virginia, in a September campaign ad, Senator Joe Manchin, perhaps the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, blasted a paper copy of a lawsuit challenging the ACA with a rifle. In Ohio, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Rich Cordray pledged to protect the state’s ACA Medicaid expansion from Republican interference. And in Wisconsin, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers has repeatedly attacked Republican incumbent Scott Walker for joining a multistate lawsuit opposing the ACA. “If you want to protect the millions of Wisconsinites with a preexisting condition, drop Wisconsin from this lawsuit,” Evers said in September.

It’s not hard to see why Democrats are now eager to align themselves with Obamacare. Last year, for the first time, Gallup reported that a majority of Americans viewed the law favorably. This past March, the Kaiser Family Foundation released another poll that put public support for the law at 54 percent, the highest it’s been since 2010. Nationally, confidence in the Democratic Party’s ability to help solve health care is at its highest level since 2006, the last time there was a blue wave in the midterms.

Republican rhetoric suggests they understand this. It’s astonishing to watch a candidate like Michigan’s Republican governor, Bill Schuette, frame himself as a champion of government health care. He campaigned on repeal and replace in 2010, and as attorney general repeatedly joined lawsuits intended to strike down key provisions of the ACA. Seven years later, with about 660,000 Michigan residents enrolled in the state’s Medicaid expansion program, Schuette, who is up for reelection, no longer opposes the plan. Similarly, in Virginia, some Republicans revolted against their party leadership in May, joining Democrats to pass a bill that expanded Medicaid under the ACA in the state. Some were coalfield Republicans, representing Virginians not far from Bristol’s 2009 picket.

Conservatives are partly responsible for the shift. For the better part of a decade, they promised to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, if voters only gave them the chance. But even with a unified government, the party failed—twice. Ironically, their attacks on the ACA may actually have convinced voters of its importance. Last March, as Republicans made their first attempt to replace the ACA, only 38 percent of independents supported the law. Over the next two months, with Republicans sniping at one another on television, these swing voters grew more uneasy about the idea that they might actually lose the ACA. By May, support for the law among independents had ticked up 10 points. The ACA, once a “radical” proposal, had become something more familiar, perhaps even reassuring, to swing voters. And in flippable districts like Wisconsin’s 1st, Virginia’s 7th, and New York’s 19th, that could be the difference between Democrats taking the House in November or not.

Now that Obamacare is finally winning majority approval, many Democrats are pushing for something more ambitious: Medicare for All. Popularized by Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016, the plan, a version of single payer, has growing support, but the polling is more complicated. Some polls show it with roughly the same support as the ACA, others with more, a few with much less.

Republicans, sensing that the numbers are mixed, have tried to capitalize. Internal Republican polling, reported by Axios in September, asserts that attacks on Medicare for All are “the best-performing message” with key demographics, including seniors and suburban women. Andy Barr, the Republican incumbent in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, has claimed that his Democratic challenger—charismatic former Marine pilot Amy McGrath—would end “Medicare as we know it,” if she were able to push Medicare for All through Congress. Similarly, as Dave Weigel of The Washington Post has reported, Representative Dave Brat of Virginia, a Tea Party favorite who unseated the powerful Eric Cantor in 2014, said in a recent ad that his Democratic challenger, Abigail Spanberger, would “bankrupt Medicare as we know it.”

Facing these attacks, Democrats may wonder if they should simply make a public show of affirming their support for the ACA and leave it at that. But voters know, after almost a decade living with the law, that it did not create “communist death panels” or lines like those at the DMV. Increased government involvement in the provision of health care—in this case, through subsidies for private insurance, and in some states, the expansion of Medicaid access—does not create shortages of doctors or overcrowded hospitals, and voters understand that now. While Medicare for All isn’t yet a guaranteed winner in all the districts Democrats need to control the House, these are encouraging signs that it, like the ACA, may one day be accepted law, with a radical reputation in the rearview mirror. In the meantime, Democrats shouldn’t abandon Obamacare now that it finally works for them. Instead, they should embrace the law for what it has revealed itself to be: proof that progress is possible.

“It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a Supreme Court opinion two years ago. The University of Texas, he a majority of justices concluded, had met this challenge with its admissions policies. The 4-3 ruling in 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas effectively meant that American universities could lawfully consider racial diversity when admitting new students as long as Kennedy, the court’s swing justice, remained on the court.

Now Kennedy is gone, and with him, a fifth vote on the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of such admissions policies. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation all but guarantees that the court will revisit the issue in the near-future. His presence may also give the court’s conservative wing the votes it would need to chip away at 40 years of precedents affirming that American higher education has a compelling interest in ensuring a diverse student body.

Harvard’s legal battle over its own admissions practices began before Kennedy retired. But his departure raises the stakes even higher as the Ivy League university’s own case goes to trial this week in Boston. Harvard is defending its policies for admitting new students from a lawsuit brought by a group of Asian-American applicants who say they were kept out by an informal quota system at the school. Though many aspects of the case are unique to Harvard’s quirky system for choosing new students, it could still eventually give the high court the opening it needs to make far-reaching changes.

For years, the face of the movement to curb affirmative action was a young white woman. Abigail Fisher kicked off a years-long legal battle with the University of Texas after it denied her application to UT-Austin’s 2008 freshmen class. Representing her in court was the Project for Fair Representation, a conservative legal organization that specializes in challenging the legislative victories of the civil-rights movement.

The organization’s founder, Edward Blum, is a not a lawyer. But he has an uncanny knack for bringing momentous cases before the Supreme Court. He orchestrated the successful legal campaign to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which culminated in the court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. The 5-4 decision struck down Congress’s formula for determining which states had to seek federal approval before changing their voting laws. Though Chief Justice John Roberts claimed the nation had moved on from the Jim Crow era, the ruling sparked an immediate surge in voter suppression in Republican-led states across the country.

In 2016, the Project for Fair Representation also urged the Supreme Court to rethink how it enforces the “one man, one vote” principle. The organization’s lawsuit in Evenwel v. Abbott tried to compel states to apportion their legislative districts by voting population, not by total population. Had it succeeded, the nation’s whiter and more rural regions would have seen a tremendous boost in legislative power at the expense of diverse urban areas with more diverse communities. Instead, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the proposition.

That same year, the justices rejected Blum and Fisher’s bid to strike down the University of Texas’s method for accepting new students. But the case hinted at another way forward. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito suggested that the university’s methods increased black and Hispanic representation in the student body at the cost of Asian-American representation. “In UT’s view, apparently, Asian-Americans are not worth as much as Hispanics in promoting ‘cross-racial understanding,’ breaking down ‘racial stereotypes,’ and enabling students to ‘better understand persons of different races,’” he wrote, quoting from a brief filed by an Asian-American legal group.

The Harvard lawsuit was brought in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit organization also established by Blum. It represented a group of Asian-American applicants who claimed that the school’s admissions policy violated federal education laws by effectively setting a de facto racial quota through their evaluation of students’ personalities. At the time, Harvard and other Ivy League schools were under growing scrutiny for declining admission rates for students of Asian descent.

“Harvard and other academic institutions cannot and should not be trusted with the awesome and historically dangerous tool of racial classification,” the group argued in its complaint. “As in the past, they will use any leeway the Supreme Court grants them to use racial preferences in college admissions—under whatever rubric—to engage in racial stereotyping, discrimination against disfavored minorities, and quota-setting to advance their social-engineering agenda.”

Students for Fair Admissions’ lawsuit isn’t without its critics in the Asian-American community, some of whom have expressed concern that their situation is being used as a vehicle to undermine efforts to help other disadvantaged communities. “My stance on affirmative action is a general reminder to the rest of America—and especially to Edward Blum—that I, along with so many other Asian Americans, refuse to be tools of white supremacy, and that we stand in alliance with all communities of color,” Thang Q. Diep, a Harvard student, said at a rally on campus against the lawsuit on Sunday.

If the lawsuit or another one like it gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to strike down race-conscious admissions programs, colleges and universities may have to turn to alternative measures to ensure a diverse student body. One of the most controversial options would be to focus on socioeconomic factors instead of race. In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209 to ban the state from considering race, gender, or ethnicity in higher education and certain other spheres. California’s state university system responded with sweeping changes to its admissions policies to offset the effects.

“Schools have reduced their reliance on standardized test scores for admissions, banned legacy preferences for the children of alumni, encouraged more community-college transfers to four-year institutions, and created new outreach programs to high-poverty high schools,” Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, wrote in 2014. “In part because of these efforts, UCLA and UC–Berkeley are far more socioeconomically diverse than most selective colleges.” This, he argued, bolstered the higher-education system’s ability to encourage social mobility.

Another proposal is to rethink the admissions process entirely. The Atlantic’s Alia Wong wrote earlier this year that some experts are suggesting that elite schools could use a lottery system of sorts to fix structural issues in the current process. “To continue to promote diversity, the school could give extra weight to certain applicants depending on, say, their zip code, the kind of high school they attended, their income, and their race,” Wong explained. “Then admissions officers could use those criteria to whittle down their batch of 40,000 applicants to a much smaller pool of qualified contenders and from there select the final 2,000 or so through a lottery (not everyone who’s admitted attends).”

Neither of these alternatives is likely to work as well at achieving as racially diverse a student body as some of the current measures used by the nation’s top colleges and universities. The most effective tool may be race-conscious admissions policies in one form or another. But with the Supreme Court’s disapproval almost certainly imminent, more creative options may be needed to achieve the same goals.