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Comment by trustfundbaby | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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

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

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