There's an alternative "sign up using email address" link too.
I've got an adblock for all Facebook rubbish, and the signup without Facebook link is part of the Facebook item being blocked.
Also, if you have noscript enabled, then you won't see the non-Facebook form either.
I have signed up, by using Chrome Dev Tools to go into the HTML and find the <div id="email_registration"> form, changing the visibility from none to block, and then starting the process from there.
Now, I realise... the fact that I've purged Facebook from my view of the internet is partly to blame, but I bet I'm not the only one on HN to have done this.
On the phone call I did say, they really need to give non-Facebook signup equal prominence to the Facebook signup. I've mentioned the GP too, in that I'm not the only one who was deterred by the Facebook only signup.
Reasons:
* Worst catalogue I've seen in a while, especially foreign films
* Facebook recommends at the top of the page - my word, there is some seriously bad taste out there
* Site barely works in Chrome
* Occasionally stumble upon some page that integrates with Facebook and hangs as I block Facebook everywhere
Bad experience throughout, might give it another chance in 6 months time but it seems unlikely right now.
I figure we're at the point on the web where Javascript et al would be expected in your browser, but even if you don't sign up for that belief, at the very least you should understand you're part of a small minority and sometimes have to make concessions.
"Now, I realise... the fact that I've purged Facebook from my view of the internet is partly to blame, but I bet I'm not the only one on HN to have done this."
Still, if you happen to not have a Facebook account or don't want to associate yours in any way, good luck!
A browser cannot always recuperate when JavaScript fails to arrive - what should it do at that point? A recent example: the outage of googleapis.com CDN caused problems on many sites using JavaScript hosted there all because OpenDNS blacklisted the domain as a phishing domain.
* http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/010612_Thousands_of_...
There are more reasons JavaScript indirectly failing in a browser: http://christianheilmann.com/2011/12/06/that-javascript-not-...
So generally, it makes sense for a site not to depend on JavaScript for a core basic experience.
Well, that's just bad planning on the part of people that are relying on a third party service for a core feature. Always have a backup for remote CDNs.
If you've done that, non-JS functionality is a tiny, tiny edge case. In an ideal world we would all handle it, but I just don't think it's realistic to expect developers to set the time aside for it.