[glneo]

cough bullshit cough, The statically probability that you would generate an actual AND proper tracking code that also just happens to be used by a site that shares all you code is less than can be described. Your team got caught outsourcing jobs to code copy/paste firms.

[daybreaker2]

"Wow, what a coincidence... we just happened to randomly generate a google analytics ID that was the exact same as the one used on a scratchpad plugin that we copied the code from..."

[skeletonjelly]

If only calculating the odds of this were as fun as 2048 we'd have a bunch of different solutions on the frontpage of HN for the next 2 weeks!

[zavulon]

And wouldn't it make more sense to create a test GA account and just use the ID from there for everything, instead of generating randomly each time?

[trustfundbaby]

I don't see any reason for the guy to lie. He could just have not responded, or quietly changed the code, but he came to the blog and posted a publicly viewable comment about it ... maybe his diagnosis is wrong and something different is happening, but I'm very willing to believe it was an honest mistake given the circumstances.

[ternaryoperator]

I don't think he's lying, but I do think he's mistaken. They probably do generate random codes, but this was not one of them. It looks/smells like a copy/paste.

That aside, though, why not just create a different Google Analytics account and use that one consistently for testing?

[deletes]

This is exactly the reason they responded. By changing the code quietly, they would implicate themselves. An official PR statement like this is obligatory.

What is more probable, that they a lying, or that the random generator generated not a single code that matched, which is very(!) improbable by itself, but two codes that belong to the same account, generated at the same iteration.

[paulgb]

This is not an official PR statement, it's an engineer responding at 11 PM (MLB is based on the east coast) with the information he/she had available. I don't think there's an intent to decieve here, just a mistaken guess of the probabilities involved. Hanlon's razor applies.

[glneo]

He has no idea that his team is a bunch of lazy outsourcers. He knows, he is just confused.

[NicoJuicy]

Yeah, it could be their CI doesn't generate random codes voor javascript code or something...

[nknighthb]

The thing that most inclines me to believe it is that, by my reading of the article (which admittedly might be reading to much into it), only a subset of MLB pages are using the ID. Hard to imagine why that would be the case if someone was simply copying code wholesale from the "victim" site.