Hello:
I am coming back to playing with Arduino after a hiatus.
I am still a newbie. I am concern I could short my laptop if I mistakenly short circuit a setup.
So I got a powered USB hub as a sacrificial layer.
Will this work ? Am I worrying about nothing ?
Or should I go even more hard core and use a dedicated computer that I won't miss for a few days if I need to fix it ?
A hub should be reasonably-good protection.
Shorting a USB port usually won't permanently kill it. Usually they shut-down safely when shorted and then you might have to reboot your computer. I believe short-protection is part of the USB spec but that doesn't mean it's 100% reliable.
High voltage (like power-line voltage) getting into the USB port will probably fry the whole motherboard.
Static discharge might also permanently fry the USB port or motherboard (and the Arduino) but that could happen to anyone at any time just by touching the contacts on a USB cable.
...I do some production testing at work. One of the products has an Ethernet port and a USB port. More than once a bad unit has fried the Ethernet port on the computer. I don't know what the defect is... It might simply be a short or there is 12V to the unit so there could be an internal 12V short to the Ethernet port. (I don't troubleshoot those particular boards.) Since The Ethernet port on the motherboard is dead, we now use a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, and we've replaced that a few times.
Occasionally one of these units will temporarily kill a USB port and re-booting fixes it.
I also test some other products and that's the only one that's ever killed a port of any kind. But I do production testing and the design has already been debugged... I only see production defects/errors. An engineering/development environment is "less stable", especially for amateurs & hobbyists. 
It is quite common to use the Arduino to control externally-powered devices, such as LED strips or motors. You may want to make sure those power supplies are either isolated or properly grounded, at the same ground level as your laptop
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