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Comment by mjh2539 | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was going to be about the species in Poeceae/Triticeae and how it derives some substantial gains in photosynthesis through special chemical changes induced by UV-A or UV-B, but (as I feared) it is instead yet another cutesily named programming thing and some other cutesily named programming thing, neither of which have anything to do (not even figuratively) with rye or ultraviolet light.

To all future makers of packages, programming languages, tools, platforms, etc., please hearken back to olde days of yore and give things long-winded descriptive names, and when these unwieldy names get too cumbersome or annoying to say out loud or type, do what your forefathers did and come up with arcane abbreviations that only our in-group knows...: OS2, APL, grep, RISC, etc.

No more of this "vodka, cucumber, rye" stuff.

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Note that your examples are very much dated---there are simply too many things in the scene for that suggestion to work. Do you know what followed OS/2? Yeah, eComStation and ArcaOS, both are not descriptive (except for the "OS" part, which doesn't really help). How about APL? Of course, J and K among others (and J is named because it's easy to type [1]). Even RISC family of Berkeley architectures had used other names for RISC III ("SOAR") and IV ("SPUR") before coming back to RISC-V.

[1] https://www.jsoftware.com/books/pdf/aioj.pdf#page=3

I too clicked the link expecting news with some distant relevance to my bread-baking hobby, instead finding information of equivalently distant relevance to my profession. Ah well - naming things is hard.

The title gave me a weird idea... Photosynthesising plants dont convert the entire spectrum of light to energy. What if u had a filter that turned all the sunlight into the wavelength that the plant uses, could u get more food from the same area of land?

Physical materials(Filters here) can change the wavelength but not the frequency. So it's still the same UV/light band. You can't change that.

I don't think we currently know of any practical way to _arbitrarily_ change the wavelength and frequency of electromagnetic waves (within the same medium), and even if there was, it would likely take so much energy that it would never be efficient to spend the energy this way.

Somehow submerging the plants within a different medium to change the entire spectrum would also likely not achieve any gains either, because by doing that you can only reduce the total amount of energy in any part of the spectrum, not shift it elsewhere (afaik).

edit: added 'arbitrarily' - as replies point out, moving towards the lower-energy end of the spectrum is not hard.

> I don't think we currently know of any practical way to change the wavelength and frequency of electromagnetic waves (within the same medium), and even if there was, it would likely take so much energy that it would never be efficient to spend the energy this way.

Isn't this the entire principle behind using quantum dots in displays?

i.e. The quantum dots absorb light from the backlight and then re-emit it as a very specific color band.

What? Yes we do. It's called fluorescence.

If you find a color range not being used effectively, it's easy to drop the frequency down to a better one.

Sorry, I should have written 'practical way to arbitrarily change...'. One of the sibling comments to yours touches on the topic of increasing the frequency, which is what I was getting at with the practicality and energy consumption.

Fluorescence is pretty easy and cheap, we use it all the time. Yellow fluorescent material is added to blue LEDs to make white LEDs; blue fluorescent material is added to paper, clothing, and laundry detergent to make whites appear brighter under UV light.

Shifting frequency the other direction is much harder; some materials exist that can double the frequency of light (known as second harmonic generation), but it's not as cheap as fluorescence. They are used in green laser pointers to turn infrared light into green light.

Photosynthesis is ca. 2% to 5% effective while even common off the shelf PV panels reach 20% easily. Assuming an efficient light source in the desired spectral range that'd make it more efficient to grow plants under solar panels with such light sources using the generated power than growing them under glass or out in the open.

That is exactly what solar panel scientists want to achieve, but it’s very hard to actually do. Capturing more of the spectrum is what’s let the efficiency percentage slowly creep from the 20’s into the 30’s.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

WTF‽ no fucking way. I really wanted to hear about unusual photosynthesis in grain but it's a goddamn wordsquat software cutebag! I'm seething.

I feel old and/or out of it

"Why not make Rye the cargo for Python? Will Rye retired for uv?"

I didn't know the Python ecosystem was this vast, I've gotten by with `pip install` and `git clone` for literally every ML project I've worked on for 3 years.

EDIT: In an attempt to contribute something more valuable:

- Astral is a company that is trying to make better Python tooling, as in more performant and easier to use. The major examples given are in Rust

- Rye is a personal project to build an automated Python dep and venv management that was released a year ago

- uv is a recently released tool by Astral that is similar

- The Rye project owner talked with someone at Astral and they figure long-term, Astral's in a better position to invest than a personal project, so Astral "will being taking stewardship" of Rye / Rye is old yeller'd

I'd add one more point: Rye is a personal project by Armin Ronacher, known for Flask and a couple more projects in the Python ecosystem.

Well, I was expecting some UV-coordinate (graphics programming) related stuff.

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