They can compete in the back-end space, but they are good at different things.
Node:
- Great for keeping one language in both back-end and front-end (if you're making a web app).
- Has package managers that are battle proof, like npm (which is taking a lot of heat recently due to politics and implementation "issues" that broke peoples builds for 1-2 days).
- Is asynchronous by default. Making it a good choice for certain use cases.
Go:
- Great concurrency model
- Small language spec, easy to learn and become productive with (this is my opinion)
- Single binary build
- Great standard library
The fact that Go is getting lots of references in HN might be that it is simply picking up attention, which is normal for any good technology.
Node is also very popular (much more than Go).
Anyways, choosing one over the other seems to be more of a choice on which language you prefer to write in. Unless your use case rules out one of the two.