From reading the article, it looks like only the first two comments were actually in the YouTube code.

He says... "These are some example debug statements I have lifted from real code that should not have been there:" The way he words it implies the rest are from other code he has run across.

Are you sure that all those statements are from YouTube player? Your understanding of English is much better than mine, but I thought only "we got meta fuck yeah" and "showing the goddamn play button" are from the player, and that than Chad gave some examples from his previous experience, from coders that he worked with "who put in quick debug statements like these and do so with good intentions to remove them later, but they never do". I believe this post was as much about the player as the practice itself – he "has been meaning to blog about for a while".

Thanks Dylan & Ludwik, fixed!

(sorry, when I wrote above post Dylan's post wasn't yet there)

Hell yeah! ****** great ****!

Actually, reading code *inside* flash (SWF) files is quite easy using what's known as "swf decompilers".

Omitting trace actions and not including variable names when tracing is only necessary to hide them from trace catchers, like the Firefox extension.

I try not to curse in my code comments...but it's hard sometimes...