alt Hacker News> just to understand block ciphers
I have a decent intuition for what a hash function does after twenty years of encountering them in the wild. I don't even know what a block cipher is. I understand hash functions less after reading this than I did before. My conclusion is that a hash function is just a block cipher in the category of endofunctors.
You know what they do, right, that's what you mean by having an intuition for them? Do you understand how they work? Why they're designed the way they are? I'm not saying you need to, but that's what the article is about.