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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 sha
by glneo 13y ago
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 13y ago"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 13y agoIf 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 13y agoAnd 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 13y agoI 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.
- deletes 13y agoThis 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 13y agoThis 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 13y agoHe has no idea that his team is a bunch of lazy outsourcers. He knows, he is just confused.
- ternaryoperator 13y agoI 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?
- NicoJuicy 13y agoYeah, it could be their CI doesn't generate random codes voor javascript code or something...
- nknighthb 13y agoThe 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.