I'm not exactly sure but I think he's implying that hacking in this way is the early part of a journey that, if it escalates into a pattern of more damaging criminal behaviour, would ultimately end in either prison or death. Still, not a terribly empathetic attitude.

EDIT: I assumed good faith, according to the Hacker News guidelines. Apparently in this case I was wrong. I just read the GP's second, more in-depth, comment further down: he's absolutely in favour of prison and thinks that in some cases death may be warranted.

Hackernews is soft on hacking crimes and I’m not. It’s as simple as that.

I am not any kind of hacker or even a terrible programmer. Just a noob. I am mostly a lurker here. I am not influenced by HN.

But I still don't understand how hacking is such a serious crime to be punished by death sentence.

In fact, there are very very few crimes which deserve death penalty.

There is a large gap between "we should be tougher on hacking crimes" and "hackers should be killed."