Mercury 3 vs Hy4 Preview
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, Hy4 Preview took 34 min 52 s and $0.32 at list price. Hy4 Preview took 4.6× as long and cost 5.0× as much.
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
Hy4 Preview
Tencent · $2.50/M out · 440 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.
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.
Patchbay is a three-person studio in Rotterdam with a very specific obsession: bringing vintage synthesizers back to life. We are three technicians and musicians who spend our days surrounded by circuit boards, calibration tapes, and the smell of solder, coaxing sound out of machines that have been silent for years. From wobbly oscillators and dead keys to crackling faders and drifting filters, we diagnose, repair, and restore analog instruments with the patience they deserve. Our workshop is stocked with rare spare parts, original service manuals, and a deep archive of hard-won knowledge about classics from Moog, Roland, Sequential, Korg, and ARP. We love these instruments not as museum pieces, but as living tools that still have music in them. Every synthesizer that leaves our bench is tested, played, and calibrated so it feels reliable enough for the stage, the studio, or the late-night jam that inspired it in the first place.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | Hy4 Preview | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | Tencent |
| Made in | US | China |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 28 Aug 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $0.834 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $2.50 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 440 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 34 min 52 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.32 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.26 less at list price, and less on 5 of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 27 min 21 s less in total, and faster on 5 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; Hy4 Preview's loads but doesn't start.





