Small thing to note: While a lot of intelectual discussion does go on in /g/, the board's culture does often encourage misleading information and trolling. Browsers of reddit and Hacker News are often called out and ridiculed, and a number of technologies are dismissed based on being ran by "SJWs".

If you can filter out these things, /g/ does have a lot of discussion, but it is very different from Hacker News.