Hacker News Reader

This sounds crazy, and is, but following those instructions verbatim with a 16.04 install I managed to brick a new laptop. Yeah...

Define "brick". You flashed the wrong BIOS?

Possibly deleted the efi partition

Or "rm -Rf /" with a writable /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ mount.

This problem was fixed half a year ago, surely Ubuntu 16.04 should have a backport of the relevant commits?