[barthelomew]

Hey there! I mostly designed and wrote most of the actual interpreter during my internship at Microsoft Research last summer. Constrained decoding for GPT-4 wasn’t available when we started designing the DSL, and besides, creating a regex to constrain this specific DSL is quite challenging.

When the grammar of the language is better defined, like SMT (https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20047) - we are able to do this with open source LLMs.

[sigmoid10]

What are you talking about? OpenAI has supported structured json output in the API since 2023. Only the current structured output API was introduced by OpenAI in summer 2024, but it was primarily a usability improvement that still runs json behind the scenes.

[barthelomew]

You're right about the 2023 JSON mode, but our project required enforcing a much more complex DSL grammar (look in Appendix for details), not just ensuring a *valid JSON object*. The newer structured output APIs are a significant improvement, but the earlier tools weren't a fit for the specific constraints we were working under at the time.

[dang]

> What are you talking about?

Please edit out swipes like this from your HN comments—this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It comes across as aggressive, and we want curious conversation here.

Your comment would be fine without that bit.

[sigmoid10]

This is not meant as snide, I'm literally confused if I might have misunderstood the problem here. Because the solution would be so obvious.

[dang]

I believe you! but when an internet reply leads with "what are you talking about?", it's likely to pattern-match this way for many readers. If that's not your intent, it's best to use an alternate wording.

[vasco]

Not to be rude, but they clarified it's not a snide, why are you trying to control speech to this degree? If we don't like his tone we can downvote him as well anyway and self regulate.

[dang]

They clarified that their intention was good, but intent doesn't communicate itself—it needs to be disambiguated [1]. What matters in terms of moderation is not intent, but effects, i.e. effects on the system in the general case [2].

Arguably your question reduces to: why does HN have moderators at all? The answer to that is that unfortunately, the system of community + software doesn't function well on its own over time—it falls into failure modes and humans (i.e. mods) are needed to jig it out of those [3]. I say "unfortunately" because, of course, it would be so much better if this weren't needed.

You can't assess this at the level of an individual interaction, though, because it's scoped at the whole-system level. That is, we can (and do) make bad individual calls, but what's important is how the overall system functions. If you see the mods making a mistake, you're welcome to point it out (and HN users are not shy about doing so!), and we're happy to correct it. But it doesn't follow that you don't need moderators for the system to work, or even survive.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...