I compiled 40,000+ driving test questions for 11 countries. What do you think?

I compiled 40,000+ driving test questions for 11 countries. What do you think?(drivingtests101.com)

38 points by mrbrianholland 13 years ago | 48 comments

swatkat 13 years ago |

Clicking on menus (about us, car insurance etc.) throws this error:

    Fatal error: Call to a member function FetchRow() on a non-object in /hermes/bosweb26a/b2005/ipg.monologixcom/drivingtests101/page_content.php on line 8

    Fatal error: Call to a member function FetchRow() on a non-object in /hermes/bosweb26a/b2005/ipg.monologixcom/drivingtests101/car_insurance.php on line 12

Also, drop-down list is empty! Chromium on Windows 7.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Thanks. Either server is down or I just got hacked...

swatkat 13 years ago | | |

Maybe server's down due to HN effect :) Why do you think it's hacked?

Edit: It's working fine now.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | | |

Footer toolbar completely missing, state dropdown box missing, country dropdown box doesn't work, tabs at top don't work. Server crash or hack?

wmclafferty 13 years ago |

In addition to the errors other people are experiencing:

- You're not minifying your CSS or JS.

- You're loading your JS at the top of the document, which is slow (http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/high-performance-sites-...)

- Response times for just loading the main page are over a second for me.

- The second panel of your carousel has items that don't fit on one line and break your design.

- 'Select your country' doesn't work.

- Even without interacting with anything on the site, I'm see this error appended to the DOM: "Fatal error: Call to a member function FetchRow() on a non-object in /hermes/bosweb26a/b2005/ipg.monologixcom/drivingtests101/includes/banner_slider.php on line 77 "

- Actually, as I click around more, pretty much the whole site is broken...

Good idea, but the site needs a lot more testing (and some design work) before it's useable.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Thanks for your input. Judging by your comments, our server had crashed while you were visiting it, limiting the functionality of the site. I will work on the first few points you mentioned - much appreciated for your input

beefsack 13 years ago |

Looks fantastic, good work!

One state is missing from Australia: Australian Capital Territory, which has it's own test and rules. Having that would be of particular use to a lot of people I know :)

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Thanks! The Australian Capital Territory is one of the next states on our list. Much appreciated for your comment

joe5150 13 years ago |

Assuming the declaration is true, great job! There's a "but", though:

I get a (rather ugly) 404 error if I click on my state without selecting a country first. It wasn't obvious to me that I had to select United States in the first dropdown since the second dropdown already had the fifty states loaded it. You should disable the second dropdown until a country is selected, or better yet don't even show it until the user selects from the first one.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Thank you very much for mentioning your issue, I greatly appreciate it. I will fix this.

Yes, the declaration is true. Took a lot of time! There is roughly 200 questions per US state per vehicle type. Plus questions for other countries.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | | |

Cheers

riobard 13 years ago |

My biggest worry is that people may rely too much on this instead of, you know, RTFM, by which they'll learn a lot of useful stuff, especially those concerning safety.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Agreed. Some people view as this as a replacement to a manual and others as a complement to a manual. Bottom line, I wish I had this resource 10 years ago when I wrote my driving test, the content is free, and the website (and especially the apps) do a much better job of engaging 16 years old than a manual will ever do.

riobard 13 years ago | | |

Totally. I read the whole manual when I did my driving test, but I still got some a copy of the questions they'll ask to review just before the test. This is definitely a much better choice than some source-unknown papers :D

rglullis 13 years ago | | |

So, how are you making money out of this? I also see a section for car insurance, but I saw nothing even after selecting a country.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | | |

You need to select a country and state. The content is free and I monetize through ads

christiangenco 13 years ago |

Protip for young drivers in the US: on the electronic driving test, you can skip questions you don't know. The system will keep asking you questions until you've answered a certain number of questions (I think it's around 20). If you don't know the answer, skip the question and it won't count against you.

This is how I got 100% correct after studying for an hour.

opinali 13 years ago | |

If you reach the end of your list of questions (50, where you need to score 40 -- NJ anyway), ad you still don't have enough points to pass, the system will simply loop and start asking again the questions that you skipped before. You don't get fresh new questions until passing :)

vxNsr 13 years ago |

While it seems like a great idea, you are gonna need to get more servers if you want to play with the big boys, I can't seem to get anywhere, clicking any link throws an error and the drop down menu is empty. Also I can see elements appear on the page as I download them... I haven't experienced that since 2004.

Still +1 for idea/effort

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Thank you very much for your feedback. Our server crashed, but now we are back-up. I received a SIGNIFICANT amount of traffic yesterday from the post. I will look into the server issue. Thanks

ewbuoi 13 years ago |

I got this error instead of question #3 for the Hawaii Motorcycle test:

Fatal error: Call to a member function numRows() on a non-object in /hermes/bosweb26a/b2005/ipg.monologixcom/drivingtests101/state.php on line 479

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Thanks. Server went down, but is now back-up. Received a significant amount of traffic in last hour!

rmp2150 13 years ago |

How did you go about compiling 40,000 driving test questions?

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Reading (many) driver manuals, inputting questions from YouTube videos of people who videotaped their printed test, receiving questions from users, receiving questions from other third parties. While some of the questions are common, I can assure you majority of questions are unique (eg - different state rules, differnt questions for car vs. truck vs. bus, etc), so the work required has been significant to do this.

hnha 13 years ago | | |

how did you go about getting licenses to do this from the copyright holders?

captbaritone 13 years ago |

Selected my state without selecting a country and I got a 404. The states dropdown was populated for US, so I assumed I could skip selecting my country.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Thanks for mentioning this. I will fix the issue. Much appreciated

scrapcode 13 years ago |

"Select you Country" doesn't work at all. Gives me nothing. Design looks like the 'era after geocities' when the ability to create gradients was first invented...

I'm really not trying to bash you. Initiative is always good, but who decides this is first page material? It has 10 pts and 17 comments... I've been noticing lately that there is a huge amount of trash coming into HN rather than what I am used to being over-the-top, higher-quality-than-usual news and/or products.

DanBC 13 years ago | |

> who decides this is first page material? It has 10 pts and 17 comments...

People voting decide what makes the front page or not. Sometimes they vote for the wrong things (purely political stories; celebrity fluff; etc.) This is not an example of wrong voting. Most ShowHNs deserve front page coverage.

> I've been noticing lately that there is a huge amount of trash coming into HN rather than what I am used to being over-the-top, higher-quality-than-usual news and/or products.

You claim that you're not trying to bash OP, but the next words you say are really negative.

Your account is less than a year old. Please re-read the guidelines.

(http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

I appreciate your comment. A lot of work went into the site and unfortunately the volume of traffic just crashed our server. Thanks

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | | |

Or just got hacked...

bonchibuji 13 years ago | |

Same here. Checked in Chrome and IE. The drop down is not working.

scrapcode 13 years ago | | |

Firefox 20 on OS X. Nada.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | | |

Thanks. Server crashed

thejosh 13 years ago | |

Dropbox broken Ubuntu / CHrome.

thefarm 13 years ago |

Apps are very useful for on the go studying. Great resource, im glad you posted it! Will pass this on to my friends kid.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

Cheers

mrbrianholland 13 years ago |

If you have any questions you would like added, please email info@drivingtests101.com.

Thanks!

rorrr2 13 years ago |

When doing a practice test, your app does a crazy number of requests to the server for each question.

Why not load all questions/answers at the same time? That would improve the speed tremendously and would reduce the load on your servers.

mrbrianholland 13 years ago | |

For the app or website?

rorrr2 13 years ago | | |

I've only tried the website.

Fatal error: Call to a member function FetchRow() on a non-object in /hermes/bosweb26a/b2005/ipg.monologixcom/drivingtests101/page_content.php on line 8 Fatal error: Call to a member function FetchRow() on a non-object in /hermes/bosweb26a/b2005/ipg.monologixcom/drivingtests101/car_insurance.php on line 12