"Asshole" is Hackernews code for "person discredited for nonalignment with political orthodoxy". There are a lot of assholes in the casual sense in SV, but a statement of the form "X is an asshole" on HN means something like "you are morally obligated to disregard or denounce anything X says, does, or establishes, because X holds political opinions I and other fellow decent people find distasteful".
The implications about the use of JavaScript, created by known asshole Brendan Eich, are left as an exercise.
The implications about the use of JavaScript, created by known asshole Brendan Eich, are left as an exercise.