

I compiled 40,000+ driving test questions for 11 countries. What do you think? - mrbrianholland
http://drivingtests101.com/

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

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

Edit: It's working fine now.

~~~
mrbrianholland
Back. Server is back!

~~~
swatkat
Thanks. I just browsed through few tests. Good work :)

~~~
mrbrianholland
Thank you very much for the feedback. Cheers

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wmclafferty
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-...](http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/high-performance-sites-
rule-6-move-scripts-bottom-7200.html))

\- 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: "<b>Fatal error</b>: Call to a member function FetchRow()
on a non-object in
<b>/hermes/bosweb26a/b2005/ipg.monologixcom/drivingtests101/includes/banner_slider.php</b>
on line <b>77</b><br />"

\- 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
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

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

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joe5150
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
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
Cheers

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riobard
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
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
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

~~~
mrbrianholland
Thanks for your feedback. Cheers!

------
christiangenco
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
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 :)

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vxNsr
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
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

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

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rmp2150
How did you go about compiling 40,000 driving test questions?

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

~~~
mrbrianholland
The copyright is our own. No copyright issues as we are not copying and
instead coming up with a question from a paragraph of text from a manual
explaining a particular concept. This is how we derived the vast majority of
the questions.

We have copyright of all of our questions.

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

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

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scrapcode
Firefox 20 on OS X. Nada.

~~~
mrbrianholland
Thanks, server crashed

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thefarm
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
Cheers

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

Thanks!

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rorrr2
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.

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mrbrianholland
For the app or website?

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rorrr2
I've only tried the website.

~~~
mrbrianholland
Thanks, I will look into this

