Most web developers who read Hacker News don't host their stuff with a hosting provider that doesn't even provide shell. With Go you just need to be able to execute a binary.
You sounded a lot like Go hasn't proved it's viable for "web scale." It has. Is it as widely deployed? Of course not, it's new.
I'm not sure what strength of PHP you're referring to--I'm assuming the ubiquity with shared hosting providers--but it's not even that great of a language to interface with databases, which was your example before.
Not arguing for Go particularly, just arguing against PHP. Its ubiquity is basically all it has going for it, but yes, that's a big deal.