At the risk of repeating what others have said, your page requiring the user to create yet another account for something that has no business requiring an account is an immediate non-starter.
Your search function could have puppies and rainbows but it surely doesn't do anything worth creating an account for.
+1, I dont want to have to login to a simple service like this. The only value a login provides IMHO is the ability for the site owner to sell my info. Probably not the case here but never can tell and not worth the hassle when I can just use existing resources that work fine and require no login.
If you want to play around with it, try account hn@example.com with password 'hackernews'