If you are fortunate enough to be using JDK 7, the newly available Objects class is the obvious (at least to me) choice for implementing the “common” Java object ...
Ok, I have a pair class (same one mentioned in earlier thread) that I am inserting into a LinkedHashSet. LHSs cannot have duplicate values and I'm assuming that it tests equality by calling the equals ...
It's not terribly clean, but you could use indexOf() and check if it returns -1. Better than breaking out a loop.