load_dataset() won't download in Windows
I have the same issue. Tried to download a few of them and not a single one is downloaded successfully.

This is the output:
```
>>> dataset = load_dataset('blended_skill_talk', split='train')
Using custom data configuration default               <-- This step never ends
``` This was fixed in #644 
I'll do a new release soon :)

In the meantime you can run it by installing from source Closing since version 1.1.0 got released with Windows support :) 
Let me know if it works for you now
I don't know if this is just me or Windows. Maybe other Windows users can chime in if they don't have this problem. I've been trying to get some of the tutorials working on Windows, but when I use the load_dataset() function, it just stalls and the script keeps running indefinitely without downloading anything. I've waited upwards of 18 hours to download the 'multi-news' dataset (which isn't very big), and still nothing. I've tried running it through different IDE's and the command line, but it had the same behavior. I've also tried it with all virus and malware protection turned off. I've made sure python and all IDE's are exceptions to the firewall and all the requisite permissions are enabled.

Additionally, I checked to see if other packages could download content such as an nltk corpus, and they could. I've also run the same script using Ubuntu and it downloaded fine (and quickly). When I copied the downloaded datasets from my Ubuntu drive to my Windows .cache folder it worked fine by reusing the already-downloaded dataset, but it's cumbersome to do that for every dataset I want to try in my Windows environment.

Could this be a bug, or is there something I'm doing wrong or not thinking of?

Thanks.