I was seeing some odd behaviour with sort -n -u.  I ran sort -n -u dataset and expected the same output as sort -n dataset| uniq but instead got something different.  sortbug is a script file showing the usage described above, dataset is the dataset. 
here is the version I am running.

sort (GNU coreutils) 8.21
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License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
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Written by Mike Haertel and Paul Eggert.

Thanks,
Nathan