[polonbike]

In my experience, you can own your mistakes by buying breakfast for the team the next day. I agree that this is different from a failure. But deleting your own account, or the production database, sending a useless email to the whole company, etc ... can all be redeemed with a breakfast, as long as it means that you own your mistake in good faith, and that you will do your best not to repeat it. (Disclosure: I'm french, we have a thing for breakfast and pain -bread)

[eugenekolo]

Culture in a lab I worked at was to bring donuts in when you messed up. I don't think this is "celebrating" failure, so much as a fun way to say sorry for messing up.