Exactly, I almost facepalmed when I realized the absurdity of a vacuum hose... although I do wonder if something along the lines of a CO2 compression canister would work to blow away dust. I'm assuming that it would be prohibitively expensive to have to constantly ship compressed gas to the mining site though.

And to be specific, vaccums work by creating a low pressure locality inside of a gas. Same principle behind a backwards fan. Push the gas one way, you create a small low pressure point that other gas then fills. In a vaccume-cleaner the region of gas that can rush in to fill the low pressure point is at the end of a nozzle.

Really, you're not vacuuming up objects, they're just along for the ride in their immediate atmosphere.

(...And in space, you have no atmosphere to manipulate.)