Gemini 4 Hydrogen vs Mercury 3
Gemini 4 Hydrogen took 8 min 39 s and $0.60 at list price, Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price. Gemini 4 Hydrogen took 1.2× as long and cost 9.4× as much.
Gemini 4 Hydrogen
Google · $7.50/M out · 1,026 HN pts
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 261 HN pts
Pelican
Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
Watch
Draw a mechanical wristwatch that shows the current local time, with a sweeping seconds hand and a date window. Make it look expensive.
Landing
Build the landing page for Lumen Cycles, a Copenhagen workshop that builds custom cargo bikes to order. Make it look like a real brand you would trust with 4,000 euros.
Breakout
Make a Breakout game I can play right now with the keyboard or the mouse. Give it several levels, a score and some juice.
Logo
Design a logo for Night Heron, an independent bookshop that only opens after dark.
About
Write the opening of the About us page for Patchbay, a three-person studio in Rotterdam that repairs vintage synthesizers. About 150 words.
In a quiet corner of Rotterdam, surrounded by the scent of warm solder and the hum of calibrated oscillators, Patchbay brings classic electronic instruments back to life. We are a three-person studio united by an obsession with vintage synthesizers and the belief that these machines belong under musicians' hands, not gathering dust in storage.
Every synthesizer that crosses our workbench carries decades of history, along with brittle capacitors, worn contacts, and drifting tuning. Whether we are facing a temperamental analog polysynth from the seventies or an early digital classic, we approach each repair with patience and precision. We do not believe in quick fixes. Instead, we study original schematics, source elusive components, and meticulously restore every circuit, keybed, and fader until the instrument plays as reliably as the day it was built. Patchbay exists to keep these irreplaceable voices singing for the next generation of artists.
Patchbay is a three-person repair studio in Rotterdam, tucked between a bike shop and a coffee roastery, where vintage synthesizers come to live another life. We are not a factory and we are not a museum; we are technicians who love the smell of warm solder and the patience that old circuits demand. Between us we have restored everything from early Moog modulars to battered Junos, and we treat each instrument as if it were the first one we ever opened. There is no assembly line here. Every capacitor is tested, every busbar tracked by hand, and every voice board is listened to twice—once on the bench, once through the speakers of the synth that will use it. Patchbay exists because these machines deserve more than a quick fix. They deserve someone who knows their quirks, their failures, and the strange, beautiful sounds that made us fall in love with them in the first place.
Specs and numbers
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen | Mercury 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 12 Nov 2026 | 16 Oct 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $1.50 | $0.10 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $7.50 | $0.35 |
| Context | 1,048,576 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 1,026 | 261 |
| Time for the six prompts | 8 min 39 s | 7 min 31 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.60 | $0.065 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.54 less at list price, and less on each of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 69 s less in total, and faster on 4 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Gemini 4 Hydrogen's Breakout game plays; Mercury 3's stopped painting.





