In case you’re using the book in the title, here’s the fix for the Chapter 3 MNIST dataset hang

1. Download by clicking on the view raw dataset from https://github.com/operalib/operalib/blob/master/mnist/mldata/mnist-original.mat
2. Use this code in your Python script:

import scipy.io

mnist_raw = scipy.io.loadmat("C:/workspace/MachineLearning/data/mnist-original.mat")

mnist = {
    "data": mnist_raw["data"].T,
    "target": mnist_raw["label"][0],
    "COL_NAMES": ["label", "data"],
    "DESCR": "mldata.org dataset: mnist-original",
}