Hacker News is much better than Reddit in general for allowing comments on both sides of an issue to be heard, but it's not perfect either. I think it benefits from not being able to see the number of votes on someone's post because it removes that way of checking the previous hive consensus. I'm not sure I even like the greying effect on heavy downvotes.
The best real discussion (especially for ongoing topics and events) I've seen is still on old-school forums like SomethingAwful. The barriers to entry help ($10 on SomethingAwful, 500 points to downvote on Hacker News) but I think Discourse went too far in that direction, where anti-spam limits can make it hard for new users to even write a good post or respond when they want to. I'd like to see a modern forum site where anyone can create a subforum and moderate it themselves the way anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit.
Isn't that...Reddit?