[patrick_grant]

I really don't like how this behaves for populating the array initially, and how it behaves for small inputs...

  $ seq 15 | dimsum  -n 10 
  14
  12
  3
  4
  5
  6
  7
  8
  9
  10

[taltman1]

Looks like a valid sample to me. Are you bothered by the ordering of the sample members? Then I'd continue the pipeline to include a call to shuf.

[snoble]

yup, the order is biased. definitely worth a couple of minutes to fix that