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

http://drivingtests101.com/

by mrbrianholland • 13 years ago

38 48 13 years ago

drivingtests101.com

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

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

Thanks!

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.

mrbrianholland24• 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.

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

Cheers

rmp2150• 13 years ago

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

mrbrianholland24• 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?

riobard2• 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.

mrbrianholland24• 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.

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.

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

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

riobard2• 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

rorrr22• 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.

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

For the app or website?

rorrr22• 13 years ago

I've only tried the website.

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.

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

Cheers

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 :)

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

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

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.

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

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

scrapcode2• 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.

bonchibuji• 13 years ago

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

scrapcode2• 13 years ago

Firefox 20 on OS X. Nada.

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

Thanks. Server crashed

thejosh• 13 years ago

Dropbox broken Ubuntu / CHrome.

mrbrianholland24• 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

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

Or just got hacked...

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.)

swatkat3• 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.

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

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

swatkat3• 13 years ago

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

Edit: It's working fine now.

mrbrianholland24• 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?

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

mrbrianholland24• 13 years ago

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

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

mrbrianholland24• 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

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.

mrbrianholland24• 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

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 :)

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

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