Yes, years ago. People haven't used it solely to mean permanently broken for a long time, it now also means "temporarily inoperable" or "broken beyond the skill of one particular user to fix it". Much like how "literally" now gets used to mean "figuratively" the use of hyperbole has turned "bricked" into meaning "not actually bricked".
Nothing is permanently broken though. At some point you can start reflashing chips and replacing internal components. Bricked has always meant the device is inoperable and beyond easy repair.
When the flashing process fails and it leaves the flash corrupted, it's often impossible to do any further flashing attempts. Good products have an immutable factory partition to recover, but not all of them do. So I think it's unfair to claim that those devices aren't bricked just because yes, in theory, you can open the device and reflash the chip over SPI or JTAG.
Your parent implied that whether a device is bricked depends on the skillset of the user. So if its subjective, there isn't much point in arguing "when" its bricked, right?
> Much like how "literally" now gets used to mean "figuratively"
It is not used to mean “figuratively”, it is figuratively as an intensifier for other figurative descriptions. If it was meant to mean “figuratively”, then it would be used in senses which the audience would not otherwise understand as figurative and be the thing which told them that the other term used was figurative; that is very much not the case.
Ironically, the shift in usage is happening at the same time that embedded security is getting good enough that it's possible to brick something hard enough that you can't reflash it without replacing chips, if you lose keys or they get corrupted.
I would expect HN to maintain the distinction where "brick" means it won't work at all due to a software malfunction, and can't be restored to a working state via a hard reset button or software update via WiFi/USB.
Its technical meaning to engineers hasn't changed, and HN is a technical site full of engineers.
