Mercury 3 vs Nemotron 3 Ultra
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, Nemotron 3 Ultra took 14 min 14 s and $0.15 at list price. Nemotron 3 Ultra took 1.9× as long and cost 2.3× as much.
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
Nemotron 3 Ultra
NVIDIA · $2.40/M out · free route · 48 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 began in a narrow workshop on the edge of Rotterdam’s Noord district, where the hum of aging oscillators meets the rhythm of the city’s canals. Founded by three synth enthusiasts — a former studio engineer, a circuit designer, and a musician who still plays the same Juno‑106 he bought in 1986 — the studio grew from late‑night repair sessions into a dedicated space for restoring the instruments that shaped electronic music’s golden era. Every unit that passes through our bench is treated with the same reverence we give a first‑press vinyl: capacitors are swapped, contacts cleaned, and calibration traced back to original service manuals. We don’t just fix synthesizers; we listen to their history, understand their quirks, and return them to the stage or studio ready to inspire the next generation of sound. Patchbay is small, intentional, and built on the belief that vintage gear deserves a future as vivid as its past.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | Nemotron 3 Ultra | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | NVIDIA |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 4 Jun 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | free route (list $0.60/M) |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | free route (list $2.40/M) |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 262,144 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 48 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 14 min 14 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.15 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.082 less at list price, and less on 5 of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 6 min 43 s less in total, and faster on 4 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; Nemotron 3 Ultra's loads but doesn't start.





