Java hash 31

In a previous post i pointed out how questions posted in reward based discussions sites like stackoverflow.com never gets answered satisfactorily. This post is a look at one such feeble answer and makes an effort to explain in more detail a basic question about hashes.

The Question

In Java, the hash code for a String object is computed as

s[0]*31^(n-1) + s[1]*31^(n-2) + ... + s[n-1]

using int arithmetic, where s[i] is the ith chara